Green Eyes
by Rain Adams
Summary: When I saw him, he reminded me of what it's like to be confined in a small cage. I felt panicked, anxious, scared, and desperate to get out. Crimson eyes met emerald. Like some sort of sadistic Christmas. "I'm a little sick in case you haven't noticed yet." There's something wrong with her coven, and Alec is just one more piece in her everlasting puzzle to find sanity. Alec/OC
1. Prologue

**Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction using the characters in the _Twilight_ world that belongs and is trademarked by Stephenie Meyer. These characters were created and are owned by Stephanie Meyer and I do not claim ownership over them or the _Twilight_ world. Images in cover are copyrighted to rightful owners with permission for use: kyle post and Mahrkids. Modifications were made. Thank you.**

Prologue

 _"_ _A memory remains just a tiny spark, I give it all my oxygen to let the flames begin, to let the flames begin…"_

-"Let the Flames Begin," Paramore

"Oh my gosh you stupid car, what are you doing?"

"Why is my motorcycle covered in black nastiness?"

"Someone just fucking hit me! What the hell?"

"EXCUSE ME, why am I in sixth place and not first?"

My coven is weird. Amber and Peaches—they are strange individuals. Especially when it comes to Mario Kart. The nice thing is Amber, my creator, was changed only thirty years ago, so she still has a sense of the current technology and such that's available to the world as of now.

"HAVESOMEOFTHIS!"

"Oh, hey! I got a present for you. I worked _super_ hard on it. Seriously, it would be an honor to have—NOOOOO FUCK YOU."

They're not the calmest of all vampires. Peaches (whose real name is Paula, but she changed it to Peaches 'cause it sounded better with her last name: Ping) was changed seventy years ago, so her concept of the modern world varies from exuberantly fascinated to painstakingly bored and perplexed.

"If this blue turtle interrupts the flow I got going on here I swear…"

"I will not lose to some losers!"

I was changed thirteen years ago, forever frozen in the mutilated but beautiful body of a fifteen-year-old girl.

I have not tasted a single drop of blood—animal or human.

I won't.

At first, waking up thirsty was like waking up with my throat submerged in embers, gradually growing into a vast ocean of fire before the pain became unbearable, hot and sizzling and sweltering and demented. A frenzy of heat. Amber says my hand was clutching my throat so tight in an attempt to soothe the ache, I actually tore a vocal cord. It healed rather quickly, although I didn't have the attention span to realize it.

The opening moments of my new life were a blur. Peaches says there was a lot of struggling as she and Amber tried to ease me up off the floor.

 _Why was I on the floor?_ I asked.

They said that if I couldn't remember, they weren't gonna bother to tell me.

"Amber, I swear if you pick Rainbow Road—"

"WE ARE RACING RAINBOW ROAD BECAUSE I AM A CHAMPION AT IT."

In the moment of my transformation, I wished I could feel nothing.

I wished I was dead.

But I guess to wish for death, you have to actually be alive, and newsflash: Vampires are not alive.

I know, shocking. Who'da thought that?

"Nonononono SON OF A—"

"I shrink you with lightning and I fall off a cliff for it? That is some bullshit right there."

Sometimes I tell myself that if they had left me to die—really, actually, fully just _die—_ things would be better. To have given my last breaths of real life away to fuel the fire that followed the change was to give a murderer the gun they would kill you with.

"YESSSSS. YES. YES. YES."

"We're not friends anymore. Get out."

"But look at my shiny trophy. Aw, I think Princess Peach will just _adore_ me for winning the Special Cup."

And it was something I had no control over.


	2. Chapter 1

**Author's Note: Lowercase writing is _intentional._**

Chapter One

 _"_ _Power, power, the law of the land,_

 _Those living for death will die by their own hand…"_

-"Annihilation," A Perfect Circle

I sleep in the bathtub of our home covered in a white sheet. Bathtubs are nice. It's not _really_ sleeping-sleeping, but the inactivity helps calm my perpetual thirst. My mind goes fuzzy, and Amber claims that I growl the way a human snores when I start to "drift off." The bathtub has claw marks from the first few weeks of my new life. Long, deep slashes that taint the smooth acrylic the same way that piss ruins fresh snow. Peaches says I was the most animalistic newborn she'd ever seen in her life.

I think I remember more of my human life than someone of our species is supposed to. I blame half of this on Amber's unique ability, and the other half on the brutality of my human life.

Amber sees us as human. All of us. Rosalie Hale, for example. Amber can take one look at her, and see the faded lifelessness of her blonde hair, the arcane violet of her eyes, the rose in her cheeks. She hears the heartbeat she used to have, the essential intake of breath, and the soft sounds of sleeping. Amber sees our pasts.

Which is what leads to what's happening right now.

"Crystal! I know you took my iPod."

"Urghnng." I mumble, pulling the white sheet tighter around me, blocking out the sun from the window above the toilet.

"I _saw_ you." She insists, yelling throughout the house. "I mean, I was out hunting but I still saw you." I hear her come in and rip the sheet off of me, instantly turning my body to diamonds as the sun hits me. My creator stands over me at a whopping 6'1".

"I've been here the whole day." I say innocently.

And there it is. The eye thing. The squinty-eye thing. When Amber is looking at your past, she squints at you like she's blind. "You've been in the house all day, but you went into my room and took my iPod at 11:34. I _know._ Give it back."

"If you're so sure of your abilities Amber, then you should see that I left it in my room an hour ago before coming here."

Sometimes Amber skips around in your past, like she's a hyper unicorn frolicking in your memories; she doesn't get all the details and specifics every time.

Amber huffs once, blowing a strand of short ash-blonde hair out of her face, before turning and swiftly going to grab the music player, returning in less than three seconds.

She stalls by scrolling through the songs, checking email, and writing a note to herself. It takes all of two minutes. "Have you eaten today?" She asks softly, seriously.

I shake my head. "Of course I haven't." This puts a scowl on Amber's beautiful face, and she silently contemplates this before Peaches come rushing in, elegant and deft. She reeks of dried blood that suggests she's been hunting a while.

Her Asian look keeps her fat and happy. Men in our state can't get enough of gorgeous Asians. While Amber has to seduce her food slowly and thoughtfully, Peaches can get a married, loyal, honest family man naked in an alley with her without any thought or skill. She feeds much more than she should.

It's silent as the three of us stand—well, I'm still in the bathtub—lifeless and still.

"I think I found something for you Crystal." Peaches sang, and she pulls out the source of the smell.

A heart.

"Freshly cut from some pothead down by the liquor store." Peaches smiles.

Blood drips from the severed arteries and veins, coating the bathroom floor in a blackened crimson substance. It has the consistency of chocolate syrup. It didn't look right, sitting there in Peaches' open palm. It was too...deflated. And brown, singed with the somber process of decomposition. Hearts were supposed to be alive and pulsing and red with blood and life. My mouth starts filling with venom at the thought.

Amber is silent, growing tense and restless as a meal is wasted right in front of her. "Crystal," she warns, a growl slipping through her teeth.

The thirst. It's coming for me. It comes for me in my sleep-like state while I'm most vulnerable. Instinctively, I grasp my throat, squeezing and scratching.

I have never tasted human blood.

I have never tasted animal blood.

"Stop that!" Amber shrieks, tearing my hands away from my neck and pinning them to my sides. I am still stronger than her, but Peaches is approaching with the heart—with the _blood_ —and I whimper, fighting the scent.

"Crystal, you are killing yourself. Do you understand?" Peaches speaks to me like I'm a little kid, incapable of realizing what I was doing to myself.

"I—I can't." I squeal.

"Crystal—"

" _Don't. Make. Me. Do. This."_ I dry heave.

It's coming. It's here. The animalism. Inhuman noises leave my mouth, my eyes are blacker than the abyss of the ocean. I throw Amber off of me and disappear out of the bathroom, knocking Peaches aside as I do. I run and run and run. I have to get away from it.

The smell of pine and dirt and downtown sidewalks and humans _(get away from the humans get away)_ and construction and lake water and beer and deep fry—the smells of Minnesota—help to ease the pain I was feeling right now.

Thirteen years and I have never fed myself. Never hunted, never drank blood. I grip a large tree stump, crying but not crying, just making the sounds and motions. That's all you become when you become of us. A sound and a motion.

 **xXx**

"it's not normal." peaches announces. " _she's_ not normal."

"it's dangerous." i offer unhelpfully.

"it's a wonder she's not dead yet." peaches muses. "or, i mean, as dead as something like us can get."

we're both silent. peaches finished the heart in the bathtub, sitting cross-legged and staring at the wall. her eyes never shift from a cherry-red; from the moment she realized what she was and what she could do, she tells me, her eyes have always been bright red. like a traffic light. she never lets herself go hungry.

"have you seen the bruises?"

"under her eyes?"

peaches nods.

"she looks like she sleeps with needles pinned under her eyes."

"or like she cries grape juice."

silence.

"there's something wrong with her."

"i _know,_ peaches." i stress, agitated.

"did you bite her wrong?"

i hit my creator even though it doesn't hurt her.

"should we take her to carlisle?"

"we took her there before, he couldn't help, remember?"

"well, she's not getting better, amber. what else do you suggest?"

silence.

"she's going to kill herself, amber. your precious little green-eyed crystal is going to kill herself."

i perk up, squinting long and hard at peaches, instantly converting her image to a carefree, petite human. searching her mind, cluttered and sporadic, i find it. the memory.

"her eyes haven't been green in—in—in almost four years." i say.

"right, it was right after we left carlisle." peaches confirms. i look out the window. crystal runs off when she's trying to fight this, when she's scared.

"we have to take her, amber."

"i know." i sigh, though it's unnecessary. "we'll go tomorrow."


	3. Chapter 2

Chapter Two

 _"_ _Go ahead tell me you'll leave again, you'll just come back running, holding your scarred heart in hand…"_

-"All the Same," Sick Puppies

I return when it's dark. Slowly and ashamedly, I ease my way into my bedroom, closing the door behind me. I'm tired. Not in the way a human feels it, but I'm weaker. It's been like that since about a month after my transformation, a month without feeding. That's when the closest sensation to being "tired" first came upon me.

Carlisle tried to decipher my abstruse eating habits, or lack thereof I suppose. The first time I met the Cullens two years after my change, I had shattered a window in their home. On accident of course, but it still shocked the family. I was in too much of a frenzy to really remember anything, but now that I know what I did, I couldn't feel more embarrassed. Esme and Emmett held my arms down as I sat at the table, wriggling and squirming. Jasper (a nameless face to me at the time) calmed me.

My skin was pale, as all vampires' are, but it was blotched with rogue red. Black eyes, like I was possessed by a demon, clouded any sense of judgement I had in the real world. Frail. Unstable. Irrational. These are the words Carlisle used to describe my state of being. He said it "wasn't normal."

 _Vampires nourish and survive on blood; they need it to be strong and to function._ He had said. _She's a newborn,_ he spoke as if I wasn't in the room, _technically speaking, she should be hysterical with need, with thirst. I think stalling any longer will kill her._

 _But she won't eat._ Amber insisted. Her voice sounded far away, confused. Like she was blaming herself. _Could something have gone wrong in the transformation process?_

 _It's unlikely. How long did it take for the process to be complete?_

 _About two and a half days._

Carlisle had looked at me with sympathetic eyes, curious and kind. Meanwhile, there was a voice in my head that didn't belong, distracting me from Carlisle's diagnosis. My head snapped violently towards a seventeen-year-old boy with bronze hair and gold eyes standing protectively over a stunning brunette woman and a younger teenager.

 _Stay out of my head._ I had hissed, feral and coarse. The boy looked slightly appalled, and the woman growled in response. Carlisle had turned towards me then, a new concern etching itself into his features.

 _She shows incredible mental strength._ He was mumbling. _Not exactly a shield yet, but close._

 _She kicked me out of her thoughts._ The boy muttered, low and thoughtfully. He sounded like he had been eating chalk his whole life; his voice was passive and prickly.

Carlisle had turned towards the boy. _Edward, what do you mean?_

I took this opportunity to struggle again, freeing my left arm from Esme's grasp before a serene feeling filled my body and I resorted to breathing unevenly as Esme resumed her hold on me. I dropped my head and stared at my feet.

 _Why won't she eat!_ Peaches demanded. Carlisle looked at me for a long time, and I felt like a prisoner under his gaze. Like a disease. Something trapped. He left. The rest of the family stared at me, unblinking. I stared at my feet harder, willing my shoes to catch on fire.

When Carlisle returned, he had a bag of blood with him.

 _It's animal,_ he had said. _I hope that's okay._

 _At this point, I'll honestly take ass blood._ Amber confessed.

 _Ew._ Peaches said, disgusted.

The closer Carlisle had got, the more ferocious I became. Even Emmett, who possessed insurmountable strength, had to grip me tighter than before. _Get. That. Away. From. Me._

Ultimately, that visit resulted in a broken window and unresolved conflict. It wasn't until my coven had returned to our small home in Minnesota that day that Amber first noticed.

 _Crystal,_ she gasped lightly, maroon eyes widening, _your eyes…they're green._

They stayed green for seven years before reverting back to an extremely ugly red. It was like dried period blood. Now, looking in the mirror in my bedroom, they were starting to turn grassy green again, an undistinguished mix of plants and dirt. It looked like cake batter.

 **xXx**

peaches and i decide to tell crystal as soon as she gets home. we hear her climb in through the window, and give her a few minutes to get situated before meandering to her bedroom. she is under the bed when we come in.

"crystal?"

she shifts a little to let us know she's alive.

"i think—i mean, we—we think we should take you to carlisle again." i tell her. peaches nods in agreement.

"why? so he can make me drink animal blood again?" crystal responds coldly.

"no one's gonna make you drink anything, crystal. we just think—it's been thirteen years and you're not looking any better. we want to see if anything's changed maybe." peaches explains.

"i've gotten more headaches lately." crystal blurts out of nowhere. when none of us say anything, i take a peek into her past.

four times in the last month she's gotten a headache whenever she's been forced to feed. she pokes her head out from under the bed like a frightened kitten. peaches smiles encouragingly, kneeling to crystal's level and poking her cheek. "hi." they both giggle like middle school girls.

"so…you're going?" i confirm. crystal looks up at me. her eyes are tinted with specks of enticing sage, light and inconspicuous to the human eye. rays of light grass-green darken the outer edges of her iris. they are beautiful.

"yeah, i guess i'll go."

 **xXx**

Alice greets us at the door, a smile on her face among her other perky habits: fleeting feet, eager eyes, and a valiant voice.

"Peaches!" She chirps, giving the small Asian girl a hug. "Nice to see you again." She turns to Amber and embraces her as well.

Then she turns to me, and her exultant demeanor shifts. I look to my feet. "Crystal." She still smiles, giving me a small hug, though it's obvious she's less thrilled to touch me. It's hard to hate someone like Alice, and her sympathetic body language (tilted head, a pat on the arm, gentle embrace) makes me hate myself all over again. The window has been fixed. I offer half a smile.

The rest of the Cullens emerge gradually. Edward, the ass that invaded my thoughts, leans on the stairs next to the woman (his wife, Bella) and the younger girl from before. Alice capers over to Jasper, who is set and ready to sedate me. Stunning Rosalie stands near the kitchen with Emmett, who is also posed to restrain me again if needed.

The only faces I'm even remotely happy to see are Esme and Carlisle, who both smile warmly at my coven.

"Hey." I say awkwardly.

"Hello again, Crystal." Carlisle says.

A brief silence ensues before Edward speaks up. "So the girl still isn't eating." He states.

 _The girl._ What am I, twelve? I glare at him, and Bella glares back. They're really getting on my nerves. Only the teenager seems oblivious and unaware of the tension, but when I smile at her, Bella pulls her back. Fine then. She smelled funny anyways.

"I can tell. You are skinnier and paler than before. And your eyes…" All eyes in the room turn to meet mine. Emotions range from confusion to repugnance.

"She's been getting headaches." Edward says tersely, and this time, Amber looks his way and glares a little. I assume he's getting inside her head, too.

Carlisle sends a warning glance at Edward, and turns to me again. "You are calmer than before. Do you still feel thirst?"

Of course I do, I want to scream. Every minute, every day. My throat…the pain…

"Yes." Carlisle nods once, and I quickly see this isn't going anywhere.

"Yes, yes. I—the thirst has always been there. It keeps me up, it makes me dizzy, yet anytime I'm anywhere near blood I get nauseated, and I have to run away otherwise I'll…I know once I taste it I won't be able to stop. I'll gorge myself in it. I could _bathe_ in it, and I can't let that happen." The Cullens look at me, surprised. That's the most I've ever said to them in my entirety of knowing them.

"Thank you, that helps. It…keeps you up?" Carlisle asks.

I nod. "I mean, I don't sleep obviously, but some days when I'm really thirsty, I rest in the bathtub and cover myself with a sheet, and the feel of being in a sleeping position takes my mind off of the feeling. Other days it's the opposite, and all I can think about in that tub is feeding." I shrug.

Carlisle takes this information in, calculating and meticulously working on exactly what's wrong with me.

"How long has your eyes been green?" He asks it so simply, like it's no big deal that I, a vampire, retain the color of my eyes from when I was human.

"After I left last time, they turned. They stayed green for seven years before turning red again, but, like, they were much uglier. It wasn't until last night they turned again."

"That's why we decided to see you again." Amber joins in.

Carlisle nods. There is another silence, and he looks like he wants to say something, but doesn't know how to phrase it. "Amber, Peaches," he starts, "if I may, I would like to speak with you two. Privately." Then he turns his attention to me. "I won't lie and say it has nothing to do with you, because it does Crystal, but I just need some information that can't be influenced by your memories or their memory of you as part of their coven. Is that okay?" His voice is kind, accepting, yet I can't help feeling like an absolute outcast at his words. I feel a prying nudge in my head again, and I hiss at Edward.

Nodding once, I turn and bolt out the door, happy to get away from all the golden eyes. The wind feels amazing, cooler, as I run away. Through the forests of Forks, where the trees are topped with a layer of white frosting. I've loved snow ever since I was little. And human.

I settle on La Push Beach, inhaling deeply.

I know why I won't eat; I know it's part of what happened to me as a human. I just didn't think my resistance would be strong enough to actually keep that promise. Amber says I was in a fragile state when she and Peaches found me, dying.

 _Why was I on the floor?_ That's my only question. Everything else is clear. Clear as crystal. Like the drug. When I was human, I once had someone ask if I was a meth addict because of my name. Crystal meth. People are stupid. I lean my head against the rocks, willing the burn in my throat to go away, wishing someone would help me through what I've turned into. A monster that's too afraid to come out from under the bed.

 **xXx**

"i need to know exactly what happened to crystal." carlisle calmly demands. "as a human, her body, her feelings, anything that identified her."

peaches and i swallow hard. this was always such a hard topic. "how far back do we need to go?" i ask.

"anything that distinctly stands out to you that in any way could've influenced the process of transformation." okay. okay. we can do this.

"make him go away first." i say, pointing at edward. bella looks at me with hatred, but i hold her gaze. neither one backs down. it's the daughter that decides.

"dad, why don't we go hunt. we can go meet up with jacob; i've missed him." her voice is angelic, sweet and diplomatic. they don't deserve her.

"renesmee," edward starts, but his wife gently places her hand on his shoulder, and reluctantly, the family leaves.

carlisle looks at us expectantly.

so we tell him.

after we tell him, he paces back and forth. the rest of the cullens are either in shock or (in alice's case) a state of extreme sympathy. i wonder how much crystal would hate us for telling carlisle.

"a human should already be dead with that amount of blood loss." carlisle says.

"we truly thought she was already dead when we found her."

"hmm. maybe…" he muses.

"what? carlisle, did we do something wrong in changing her?" peaches asks, frantic. the entire time we were speaking to him, carlisle's face contorted to become more and more confused, and eventually, appalled and disbelieving. our undead hearts ache, peaches and mine, at the thought that we, _i,_ were responsible for dooming crystal to a life of starvation and shifting eye color.

"it's not that you _changed_ her…it's the state she was in when you changed her…"

 _well, what the fuck does that mean?_

carlisle stops pacing abruptly, an idea sparkling in his eyes. "i need to see her."

 **xXx**

Carlisle takes my blood when I get back, and everyone unsubtly cringes at how black in color it is. I look at my coven the whole time, and they look away uncomfortably. What did they talk about while I was gone? I notice the mind-reader and his family are gone, and Jasper comments on how much calmer I am without them. Jasper's odd.

"Crystal," Carlisle starts, "I was told of your life before becoming a vampire."

My eyes widen and I look at Amber, panicked, who still won't look at me. Well. I guess I know what they were talking about now. How lovely. The rest of the Cullens look at me with pity, especially Rosalie, and I reject all of them. I don't want sympathy.

"There are no judgements here." Jasper says awkwardly, and the Cullens all offer a smile. I look away in embarrassment; it doesn't help the fact that they _know_ now.

"Given the anatomy and transformation of a vampire," Carlisle diverts the subject, "I've come up with the best explanation I could think of, though don't take this to heart; it is only a hypothesis." I nod, telling him to go on, tightly holding onto the waistline of my jeans.

"Crystal, you should've been dead when they found you given the state they found you in. Humans can survive up to 40% of their total volume of blood being lost before they die, even before that they are in pretty serious trouble. With your age and size, that's barely over 2 liters of the 5 liters of blood in your human body. When they found you, you were pushing about 3 liters of blood loss. _You were dying._ Very, very rapidly." He stops to take a breath, not anywhere near explaining why I can survive without eating, but I'm listening intently anyway. I didn't think I had lost _that_ much blood by the time I was found.

"Amber bit you on the wrist, where the ulnar artery is located. The bite—" Carlisle is stopped—everyone stops—when Edward, Bella and their child return.

There is something wrong.

"Amber," Edward spits through clenched teeth, not bothering to take in the current situation at all. Asshole. "Why have you failed to mention that you were once with the Quileute werewolves?"

The room is silent and cold. Rigid. Amber rarely mentions her fantastically sadistic past to anyone. It took her three months to tell me after we met. In less than a day, the Cullens have managed to begin unravelling the spider webs of my coven's history. I assume they'll know of Peaches' necrophilia-sex fantasies soon enough.

"Edward, what does this have to do—"

Edward cuts Carlisle off. "We went to visit Jacob, and Renesmee was telling him about 'the visitors at our house.' The minute he saw you three he knew exactly who you were." The impending anger in his voice was projected throughout the room, settling on our shoulders like a fresh snowfall. Bella, surprisingly, addressed the entire room now.

"They're liars. We never should've allowed them in here to begin with."

Alice quietly _shushed_ and _hushed_ to herself, hating conflict. "Bella, why are you—"

"Tell them. I want them out of our home. Carlisle don't give us that look!" Bella was yelling now, gripping Renesmee's shoulders hard enough to qualify as child abuse. " _There's something wrong with her."_ Looking directly at me now, we both let feral growls rip from our throats. "I want them out of our house!" On my feet. Peaches holding me back. Nothing but red rage electrifying my body.

It happened so fast. Like a jock-ass jealous boyfriend that treated his girlfriend like a trophy, Edward shoved his wife and daughter behind him, coming to tower over me, an inch from my face.

"Edward, really. This is enough!" Carlisle started to intervene, but Edward blocked him out, only focusing on me. Only interested in hurting me. The fear, the adrenaline, the tension seared through me, peeling the rationality off of me the way cannibals prepare to cook the flesh of their victims.

It happened so fast.

 **xXx**

it happened so slow. like a dramatic movie scene. crystal, from the moment we met her, never had a very firm grip on her temper. she struck first, clawing at edward's neck, a river of blood dripping on the front of his shirt. bella gasped and ran towards crystal; peaches pushed her up into the ceiling, cracking the roof. edward invaded crystal's torso area, seizing her and throwing her on the floorboards like he wanted to rape her. she kicked up, sending him flying into the wall behind them.

bella rushed forward, one hand wrapped around crystal's neck like a snake suffocating its prey. crystal's hand yanked bella's leg, knocking her down before she went in to rip her head off.

"stop!" i yelled, but now edward was after me, the cut on his neck had healed.

the rest of the cullens worked to ease bella out from under crystal's grasp, who was vivid and belligerent.

my assailant was strong, but peaches was stronger, and ripped him off me right as the crystalized preservation of my skin had started to tear. they were clinging to each other in a blur of movement, a swift _crunch_ or _crack_ here and there, enveloping each other in a hurried mist only vampires were capable of.

" _enough!_ " emmett, who was (again) holding a screaming crystal down yelled. some screams can't be replicated. hers was one of them, and though i knew emmett was only helping to calm everyone down, there was no one else i wanted to hurt more than him in that moment.

everyone stopped gradually, looking at the damage done to each other, which healed momentarily anyway. edward grabbed me one last time, coming in close and whispering vehemently, " _never come back to my coven again"_ before carlisle's loud, superior voice commanded: "ENOUGH."

then he looked at my coven. crystal, who was only panting now underneath emmett's hold; peaches, who was standing awkwardly behind edward, ready to yank him away from me again; and me, still in edward's clutch, slammed against the window near the front. crystal looked the most fragile, yet the most dangerous. her bruised skin made her look like a veiled zombie among ghosts.

"i have to speak with you three. _now._ "

 **xXx**

"I am sorry for Edward's behavior. He's never really gotten over Jacob's imprint on his daughter and he can be…overprotective at time."

Carlisle walked us through the forests of Forks, away from civilization, away from his coven. Amber was gripping my arm tightly, leaving a bruise that would never heal nearly as fast as it should.

"He's an ass." Peaches stated. I would've thought Carlisle would've cracked a smile, but the comment seemed to put him off and make him uncomfortable. I never knew how Amber and Peaches came across the Cullens. They just showed up in my bathtub one day, claiming they'd found someone who could help me. I'm curious now about how they met.

"He can be overdramatic, but he's a good boy." Carlisle never pressed the issue of Amber being with the werewolves at one point. His only concern was us, right now. Not our pasts, not our associations. It was unnatural how considerate he was.

We'd stopped walking when we were in a densely populated area of the forest. Each of us, with the exception of Carlisle, leaned against a tree and waited for what he had to say.

"Friends," he started, "I have a…suggestion…that I'm unsure you'd be willing to accept, but I know it could be of help." We waited anxiously.

"You know of the Volturi, yes?"


	4. Chapter 3

Chapter Three

 _"_ _A constellation of tears on your lashes, burn everything you love, then burn the ashes…"_

-"My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark," Fall Out Boy

The Volturi.

Goody.

My coven holds their breath, solemn and skeptical.

"How could they be helpful in any way?" Peaches snarls.

"I'm aware that…no one is on real exceptional terms with them. But when I lived with them, there was something I think might help Crystal. When I stayed with them, they relentlessly tried to convert me to feeding from humans. At one point, Aro dropped a bleeding human right outside the library I was studying in simply to test my resistance."

We are all listening, doubtful that the three cruelest and oldest vampires in the world could help with some 15-year-old anorexic vampire, but Carlisle seems confident. Peaches shifts from her position by the tree and inched closer to Carlisle, indirectly stating her dominance in the coven and her duty to protect us—even from something impalpable like an idea.

Carlisle notes the movement and quickly adds, "I would never send you three somewhere that I didn't think was safe. I knew Aro; he was my friend, and I believe he thought the same of me. He was very concerned with my diet when we first met, but never forced me to change. All I'm suggesting is that you visit for two, three days and maybe he will be able to…convince you of some sort of…dieting." He finished clumsily, avoiding Peaches' glare. "I'll even escort you and stay with you if you'd like, to explain the situation."

As the proposal sinks in, the sugar-coating slides off like beaded water drops on a raincoat.

"You want Aro to be Crystal's personal weight watchers instructor?" Amber asks, though it comes out sounding more like a declaration.

"Crystal's situation is unique." Again, I'm right here. "I understand why she won't eat, and I respect that." He smiles at me. Yeah, hi. I exist. "But Aro has spent centuries meeting and mingling with vampires with incredible abilities. He might be able to decode whatever it is in your body that keeps you alive without the nutrients we need in blood."

Amber is itching to make another sarcastic remark, and we all feel her anger boiling inside her. I wonder if she's seeing Carlisle as a human right now. How, even when his heart was still beating, he was nothing but compassionate and sincere. Or maybe she's just envisioning a lot of head-ripping. It's hard to tell with her.

The next time he speaks, he sounds desperate. "Aro can see things I can't. He can read feelings, memories, thoughts—everything. Edward is limited to thoughts at the current moment but Aro upon touch can read… _everything._ " He sounds amazed by this, but underneath the amazement, there's something more. Regret. I wonder what happened between him and Aro.

Amber doesn't skip a beat when it comes to declining. "No—no, no, you know what they're going to do, Carlisle? Aro's gonna take one look at her and turn her into a fucking clone amongst their guard. The werewolves hate us 'cause they think we're soulless statues—"

"Amber—"

"—but they've never seen real statues. Real statues are those monsters that sit around in their fancy Italian castle all day, waiting to kill people. They're too damn lazy to get their own food for goodness sakes! And you want them to teach _her_ how to hunt? No."

"Amber," Peaches sighed, tired and worn-out. " _Think_ about it." She says after a minute, but Amber launches into another highly articulate argument regarding the various ways the Volturi were going to use me for their _atrocious Satanic sacrifices that would most likely involve bestiality sooner or later._ Her words, not mine.

Carlisle stood there patiently, coming over to me and smiling reassuringly. Even for him, this idea was outrageous. While my coven argued, Carlisle looked at me, softly placing a pale hand on my shoulder.

"Crystal," I could tell what he was about to say was hard for him, and I couldn't help feeling bad for putting his entire coven through the trouble that I have. "When I was first turned, I experienced an immense… _hatred_ for myself, for what I'd become. I had attempted to kill myself several times: drowning, jumping off cliffs, hanging. And starvation." I stared at the gentle man in front of me, squinching (is that a word? Well, it is now) up my face into clear disbelief. That's like…Mario trying to kill himself right after he gets star power. Carlisle chuckled at my reaction.

"I wasn't nearly as strong as you. I attacked a herd of deer after about two weeks. That's when I realized animal blood was a much more humane way of living. Who knows? Maybe that's the life you'll choose, too."

I nodded absentmindedly, still trying to wrap my mind around Carlisle trying to starve himself. How much pain he must've endured before snapping, and it makes me so…mad at having never tasted blood for thirteen years. What I've done looks easy compared to Carlisle's mere bloodless two weeks.

Amber and Peaches come back; they had wondered away to argue in Vietnamese—they do that when they're real pissed—and might've gotten physical, but I don't know for sure. They're always beating up on each other. Usually over stupid shit.

"Crystal," Peaches says, breathless, "after some debate, we realized it was _your_ decision. You know what we've told you about the Volturi. It's your body. Your life. Your level of comfort. We're willing to go to Italy if it means it'll help."

Amber says nothing, and I know she's still fueled at the idea of me going to Volterra, but she gives a small, tense nod to show she'd be willing to go as well. Suddenly every pair of eyes are on me, but I feel no panic. I felt a sort of excitement bubbling inside that arrantly contradicted Amber's cold, gripping resentment.

"I have always wanted to see Italy."

 **xXx**

i hate this. i hate it. hatehatehatehatehate.

but i love crystal.

"should we inform the volturi of our visit beforehand?" crystal asked, packing a small bag of clothes and books.

peaches waved her off, distracted. "nah, they ought to be honored to have three sexy girls popping up outta nowhere."

i can't help it, i smile.

peaches is trying to remain open-minded and peaceful, but i know she's just as irritated about this as i am. her and i—we do not have the best history with the power-thirsty vampire rulers. leaning in crystal's doorframe, i prepare her for everything the volturi and the guard has to offer.

"you know…that aro will be able to see everything. whether you want him to or not, he'll see it once he touches you."

crystal freezes. "i know. i'm trying to tell myself it's for the best. the cullens knowing was one thing," i look down, humiliated i was the one to tell them, but crystal seems unfazed, "but the volturi—strangers—are another."

"it'll only be aro. no one else." peaches quickly jumps in. crystal nods again, lost in thought. thoughts that will soon no longer belong to her, but to a monster. i breathe deeply, closing my eyes and praying to God—if there is one—that the volturi don't take what happened between me and them out on crystal. it was long ago; not long after peaches changed me but before we met crystal. what was it…twenty-five years ago?

"so!" peaches claps, startling us all. she jumps on crystal's bed like a five-year-old, swinging her legs back and forth. "demetri's hot. just coming out and saying that right now."

we all start laughing, thankful for the mood change.

"but you can't get attached. to _any_ of them. not that i think that'll be a problem. they're all like… _rawr, rawr, i be volturi. rawr, look at my fancy clothes. rawr, and my fancy castle._ "

peaches' voice is all squeaky like she inhaled helium and crystal is laughing and all i can think is when aro reads her thoughts he's going to see this moment and we're all going to die.

" _rawr, i be smexy demetri. play hide and seek with me. rawr, i be felix. i be fairy."_

"peaches…" i warn, even though i'm trying hard not to grin.

" _rawr."_

crystal's laughter has subsided, but she's still smirking like a lovesick schoolgirl. "are they really that bad?" she asks.

peaches and i look at each other, shrug, and sugar-coat:

"one is unhinged."

"another is hardly noticed."

"there's one who's indifferent."

"demetri is hot."

" _cough_ he's not _cough._ one is strong."

" _cough_ he is _cough._ someone is merciless."

"there's a sadist."

"and a slut."

"and a drunk."

"ultimately, the volturi are the vampire version of south park."

"i've never watched that show." crystal admits.

"lucky you." i smile.

"so am i supposed to guess which one's which?" she asks.

"that's the point of the game." peaches responds, and lightly whacks her as she leaves for the bathroom to grab her sheet.

i turn to peaches. "was that really necessary? we're going to die now."

"i know." her expression has turned serious and dark. all traces of joking are gone. her thoughts are where mine were moments ago. "i'm just worried about how they'll remember us. might as well show them how we remember their coven. i'd like to go into this with the attitude henry rollins did: _i hit him to get his attention. i shot him to calm him down. i killed him to reason with him."_

 **xXx**

Volterra is a beautiful city. Buildings and buildings, all with walls preserving history and art, surround me as I travel through the village bustling with people. Clear skies, a vibrant atmosphere, and sights that have nothing on Minnesota fill my vision. Cliffs where even one misplaced foot will send you falling to your death litter the landscape.

A sudden shudder runs through me at the thought that Carlisle once tried to throw himself off a cliff in hopes of ending this eternal life.

There are some areas that are deserted with nothing but the natural countryside to keep one company. I think those are the most beautiful parts of the city, where one can be alone and sheltered from other people. But then I see the village with all the little shops and restaurants, and I think that to be lost in a crowd, just another face passing through, would be better than being isolated with your own thoughts. That can get dangerous awfully fast.

Too bad I'll be experiencing none of it 'cause I gotta stay locked in a castle with my diet teacher.

"We're here." Amber says, giving me a tight smile. I breathe in and take in the enormity of the fortress. Jitter bugs crawl in and out of my unbreathing lungs and my dead heart, and I'm sure all those vampires inside can feel them, too.

Through the huge wooden doors, where a human _(she's so close so close soclose I can smell her)_ greeted us, down a long corridor, through another set of doors, and finally, into the throne room. It is vast and cathartic; something about the elegiac paintings and gaudy decorations soothe half my nerves.

They instantly return when I see those occupying the room.

Three vampires, dressed in lavish attire, sit upon three thrones in the middle of the room. They radiate control and superiority.

Four other vampires, two on each side of the thrones, stand unmoving in cautious postures. There's one that reminds me of Emmett with his build, one with a careless expression that Peaches automatically glides towards (I'll assume this was Demetri), another boy with mischievous eyes, and beside him, only one girl, innocent yet lethal.

"Ahhh, sweet Amber and lovely Peaches!" The vampire in the middle, Aro, sighs dreamily, coming forth, smiling enthusiastically. He greets my coven cheerfully, hugging and holding their hands…for a prolonged period of time…his eyes glaze over…the smile never leaves…he _has_ to be the one that's unhinged. Then he looks at me, and I know within minutes he knows the whole story.

"And Crystal." He titters. "Exquisite, charming, green-eyed… _starving Crystal._ "


	5. Chapter 4

Chapter Four

 _"Is it any wonder I'm tired? Is it any wonder that I feel uptight? Is it any wonder I don't know what's right?"_

-"Is It Any Wonder?" Keane

I'm immediately uncomfortable, and my entire coven stiffens. Aro floats over, that ridiculous smile never faltering.

"Um, hi." I say. Red eyes. So many red eyes staring at me. So many bodies in one room, never moving. As sick as it is, Aro is the only one making even a remotely normal attempt at interacting. He holds out his hand, waiting, and as slow as cement drying, I offer him my hand.

Instantly, I feel his presence. It's invasive, aggressive, searching. Sorting through my memories, I feel him look at my encounters with the Cullens, he picks through fragments of my pain, he witnesses the nights I clawed our bathtub and the afternoons I spent with my arm in my mouth in a fraught attempt to _feel_ something against my tongue, against my teeth: The sensation of eating. He delves deeper and deeper, and I stare hard at the spot on the floor in front of the boy, who has a bored expression.

Then Aro gets to my human memories; the sharpest ones in my mind. Sharper than my transformation. I was already dead when I was transformed, but as a human? The torture was real, and it was never-ending. I can't stop myself. I start trembling, gripping Aro's hand harder and harder and harder and harder and harder and harder and harder andharderandharder—

He jerks away harshly, and I'm taking in enormous gulps of air, my eyes never leaving the floor space in front of the boy. He has moved so he's in a more attentive spot, but his face is still just as bored.

 _"_ _Why would you make me relive that?"_ I scowl, never looking at Aro. My eyes are on the boy, just for something to focus on.

The three kings seem intrigued by my outburst, but less than startled. The one on the right with platinum hair, appears to want to kill me in a very brutal manner. He seems like fun.

Aro seems sensitive, but he could very well be faking it. "My dear, I am sorry! Though usually my ability doesn't have that effect on people. You are…different." He sings. He contemplates something for a while as I regulate my breathing. Amber pats my back soothingly.

"You have never drank blood in your entire existence…mesmerizing!" Aro is saying, walking in circles, giving a look to each of the other vampires in the room. Then he turns to me again, now halfway across the room. "Why?" So simple. Everyone treats my problem as simple.

"You saw why."

"I saw a broken girl laying on the floor in a pool of her own blood and…other bodily fluids. I never saw _why_ she won't eat."

 _Other bodily fluids. On. The. Floor._ What, did I not make it to the bathroom in time? Why was I on the fucking floor?

"It repulses me. Humans. Their blood. I don't want that _inside_ me." I stress. My gaze has turned to resting on the girl, who has a very unsettling appearance. She looks like the boy; they could be twins. She seems more intent though, while the boy is carelessly staring at the wall behind Peaches. The girl, no more than fourteen or fifteen—my age when turned—focuses her entire being on us. On the intruders.

"Fascinating." Aro exclaims.

"Brother," the blond vampire spoke for the first time, "why are we wasting our time on this girl's problems? What use is this scum to us?"

Aw, love you too.

Aro turns flamboyantly, looking dazed. "Caius, these three…lovely girls with…" He swallows once, like he can't drink up our presence enough. "With remarkable abilities have come to us for help. Surely the least we can do is offer our opinion." Caius glares, but doesn't say anything more.

I've never heard anyone refer to my condition as remarkable, but maybe he wasn't talking about me. Amber is the one with the power. Missing her, I turn to see where she was. I thought she would've said something by now, but she hasn't uttered a word.

She's in the corner of the room, in the shadows, gawking at the boy, who still has no interest in anything that's happening.

 **xXx**

he's beautiful. brown eyes, but not the basic brown that more than half the humans in the world possess. his hold specks of gold, but when the light would hit right, the contrast is enormous and they darkened to a striking chocolate. brunette hair, soft but dirtied from running in the village with his sister. he's naturally pale, but once he was consumed by flames at the stake, his flesh sizzled and bled. he cried. even human, there was something wrong with him and his sister.

i hate him, too.

he didn't look like this last time.

when i came here last time, i saw him as what i saw everyone else as: the plain nakedness of human.

 _something's wrong._

 **xXx**

I look at Amber questioningly, but am interrupted by Aro suddenly standing three inches in front of me.

"Dear, you are always exhausted. Your body thrives only on the absence of your soul to continue each day…fascinating." He mutters. "Why don't we have you stay up in the tower during your visit? You'll each have your own bedroom—unless, of course, you'd like to share—adorned and designed to your needs. My guard will be most happy to assist you at any time during your…rehabilitation." He turned towards the twins.

"Alec, Jane. Please show our curious guests their room. It's awfully late."

It was only 5:00 but alright. I was mentally exhausted anyway.

Aro came closer with a smile that could be mistaken for a sneer, and lightly gripped by face between his hands as if he was about to kiss me. He stared for a long time, dissecting my eyes, like if he looked long enough he'd be able to detect the red iris that was _supposed_ to be there and fix everything. "Simply fascinating." He whispered.

The twins appeared at my side and without looking at me, and led us away to the tower. The walk there was quiet with little conversation.

"As guests, there are rules." Jane was saying, strolling at a slow pace to draw out the conversation. "At absolutely no time are you to disturb Master Aro, Caius, or Marcus unless they specifically ask for you. If you need anything, call Felix, Demetri, Alec or myself. You are permitted to wander the castle only if you are escorted by one of us. You will stay in the rooms next to Mistress Sulpicia and Mistress Athenodora—Master Aro's and Master Caius' wives. You are not to disturb them. Touch nothing. And lastly," Jane stopped in front of a set of three doors, each angelically carved. Jane turned to look me right in the eyes. "Feeding hours are typically between six and eight, unless Heidi decides to bring an extra special meal. You don't eat, you starve."

Then the little witch smirked at me.

My entire coven glares at the twins.

Then Alec steps forward, placing his hand on his sister's back, rubbing small, relaxing circles. "Of course, I'm sure Master Aro will install special conditions for our little… _affamé ange."_ He said playfully. Then he reached behind us, opened each door, and gestured us inside.

The room is beautiful. Ancient, but beautiful. There are no beds, but bookshelves and a desk and little tables with impressive figurines and trinkets. A comfy-looking chair is in the corner and it looks so soft and I want to touch it. A small window overviews the city of Volterra. Alec, like a child, sits on the armrest of the chair and stares out the window. Jane blocks the doorway as we look around. Both of their eyes shine like little cherries when the light hits them.

"Groovy." Peaches says, the first time she's said anything this whole time.

Alec nods. "Crystal, why is it you won't eat? It's practically the defining factor of what we are."

His voice is deeper than I imagined. I wonder how old he was when he was changed. He looks too young. "I don't want my survival to be based on something as weak as a human liquid."

"But that's why we eat them: Because they _are_ weaker than us." He says, monotone.

"I really think only Aro needs to know my reasoning, Alec. Thanks." Neither twin shows much of a response, though Jane clenches her jaw and Alec gives a look that says no one's ever really spoken to him like that.

He nods again. "You will become addicted sooner or later." Is all he states confidently before leaving with his sister, hand in hand.

Alone with my coven, I flop down in the chair, rather ungracefully for a vampire.

"I already regret this." I mumble.

"We can leave if you want, Crystal." Peaches soothes. "They seem uncaring and stone-like, but deep, deep, deep, deep down…that's all they really are." She hugs me. I only feel a little bit better.

"Amber?" I ask after a moment. She is staring at the spot on the chair where Alec was sitting. She hasn't said a single word since arriving.

Her eyes are going dark. She needs to feed. "Something's wrong with Alec…" she whispers.

"What do you mean?"

"He doesn't look the same as last time. He's…I saw…" Amber is biting her knuckle, a nervous habit she's obtained since she was changed, she tells me.

I'm about to ask her another question, but a tiny _whoosh_ interrupts us. Felix is standing at the door.

"Excuse me for intruding, but Master Aro would like to inform you that Heidi has returned with dinner. As part of your road to…recovery…" They're really running out of things to call it, aren't they? "Aro would like you to attend, Crystal. You are not required to feed, simply to be present." He gives what I think is a smile, but I can't say for certain.

Peaches nods, resuming her role as the leader. Plus, Amber is still in a trance over what she saw. "We'll be right there."

Felix nods and leaves. But halfway down the hall, he turns back and looks at us.

"Since you'll be with us for a while, I have a topic of discussion we may engage ourselves in later." He smiles cloyingly, but it's the way a big brother smiles before he's going to prank you. "Aro tells me you three think of me as a fairy…"

 **xXx**

i avoid alec at all costs, which isn't all that difficult once the smell of blood comes closer and closer. peaches and i proceed into the throne room while crystal hangs back, leaning against marcus' throne. a fresh batch of tourists enter led by a gorgeous woman in red. heidi. her past reminds me of rosalie's, where even as a human, she was beyond attractive.

aro attacks first from his place by the entrance. a woman in her twenties.

i am about to leap at a man that looks about forty, but once i see the guard holding back, crouched but waiting, i realize the kings have first choice.

i am beyond fucking annoyed, but wait nonetheless, mostly out of fear of jane. _she's_ the same as before.

after the kings, everyone rushes forward at once. screams fill the room and echo hauntingly even after death. i approach an unattractive woman in her thirties, who is crying and begging. backed into a wall, she pleads and pleads, saying she has a son who is five years old. saying she has a husband. i brush the hair from her face, cupping her cheek, growling, and finally, jerking her head to the side and biting her neck.

i instantly feel a rush. there is a satisfying, fulfilling sensation in my throat, like a hose putting out a fire. i close my eyes.

it's all i need.

looking around, only felix and marcus are finishing up. everyone else is standing up, adjusting themselves or licking extra blood from their face. _cough_ demetri _cough._

the drain in the middle of the room collects the wasted blood, and heidi makes quick work of the bodies, piling them near the front of the room to be disposed of later.

there. it's done. we've all fed. simple as can be.

a strong, unbreakable unease settles over us like fog, and everyone remembers why we're here, and what we've come to accomplish. every head waits an eternity before the eyes of the volturi are on the green-eyed girl in the corner.

there are a medley of scratch marks on the pillar she's leaning against, and her expression is contorted into misery and torment. she's trying to hide her shaking, so it looks like she's slightly vibrating against the stone. her lips, barely half an inch from the wall, are open and pulsing like a fish out of water. she wants to feed so bad.

unexpectedly, it's alec that goes to her, dipping his hand in a puddle of blood along the way. for a long time, he just stands there, watching her as if she was a new animal that's been discovered, and i realize everyone is looking at her that way. everyone is seeing the effect of starving for the first time.

almost hesitantly, alec brings his fingers to her face. she grips the pillar tighter.

"taste it." he commands simply. he could've been offering someone a used car, but crystal shakes her head so fiercely you'd think he was proposing poison instead.

"lick it." another command. when crystal speaks, it's hardly her voice. it sounds like a fucking Satan ritual about to take place.

 _"_ _no."_

alec is done asking, and traces her cheek with his bloodied fingers. "now."

 _"_ _no!"_

her eyes watch alec as he gently traces her face, applying a layer of wet red to her skin. she's shaking so badly, she's begun to slide to the floor, never looking at anyone else in the room. aro has joined alec, and he respectively steps down, returning to jane's side, who looks on in a sort of captivated wonder.

crystal grunts, and aro grips her trembling hand. from the looks of it, crystal needs the support, and grips his hand back.

i know he's either seeing one of two flashbacks: 1) crystal's state right before transformation. on the floor. chained. 2) her state immediately after transformation. bloodlust. vengeful. _insane._

he's either witnessing the victim or the killer.

 **xXx**

The blood is on my face. On my eyes. _In_ my eyes.

 _Maybe your eyes will finally be red now,_ I think humorlessly.

Alec's fingers tickle as he wipes it on me, like I'm some bug he's scraping off the wall. It almost breaks me. I refuse to look at him. I only look at his fingers, and the tender way they caress my cheeks. He's like a fucking child. _Just taste it, Crystal._ Or a high school drug addict. _Just lick it. One lick won't hurt._

There is a bullet in my head struggling to get free. My temples feel like they're closing in on each other. Suddenly, there is a hand holding mine. It is not Alec's. I grasp it tighter, falling to the floor. Involuntarily, I indulge myself in the images of my past. There is blood. It is on my face. Other voices cry out. A man is among them. More blood splatters, making swift, cursivey designs on—where? My face? The walls?

The line between moments before my death and minutes after I wake is blurred.

My eyes snap open, and it is a wonder they are able to focus on anything in sight. But they do. They settle on Alec now, right on his face, who is standing back near his sister. His eyes widen slightly when I look at him, and I can only imagine what he's seeing.

When I saw him, he reminded me of what it's like to be confined in a small cage. I felt panicked, anxious, scared, and desperate to get out. Crimson eyes met emerald. Like some sort of sadistic Christmas.

I am brutally ripped from the floor and hauled over someone's shoulder, kicking and hissing like a toddler with a temper.

"Who's the fairy now?" Felix tries to mockingly tease, but his voice is strained, and he almost drops me when I struggle. Aro stands in front of Felix, alarmed. The blood tickles my skin as it slides from my eyelids where Alec smeared the substance; it trickled to the bridge of my nose, and held there. Instinct squenched and tugged at my insides, screaming in a tiny voice that resembled a human who inhaled helium _taste it taste it stick your puny little tongue out and just taste it! yum yum yum yummy yay!_ But the voice in my head, in a voice low and deep and similar to bricks rubbing against each other whispered _don't._ And that one word, despite the brevity and being whispered, scared away the little helium people in my tummy, and with the strength of a newborn, I threw myself off of Felix's shoulders, shattering the floor beneath me, and darting out into the warm, sunny air of Volterra.


	6. Chapter 5

**Author's Note: Updates will be slower. School has started.**

Chapter Five

 _"Anger and agony are better than misery,_

 _Trust me, I've got a plan,_

 _When the lights go out, you'll understand…"_

-"Pain," Three Days Grace

The city is bustling with activity and liveliness and smiles and laughter. It makes me nauseous. I run past it all, darting behind buildings and sprinting through alleyways until I'm out of the city and in the countryside. Voices in my head replay what has happened, but the most prominent of all feelings is the cold, delicate touch of Alec. How his fingers traced my face, almost lovingly, before tainting it with _that._

The blood is still on my cheeks. In my eyes. I cry it.

I hate Alec. _I hate him._

Sliding down the side of a small foothill, I ease under a berry bush into some animal hole. There, I rock back and forth like an immature child, feeling sorry for myself. I have calmed slightly, but the fucking blood _on my face_ still makes me twitchy. Tentatively, as if I was balancing a glass pixie on my pinkie, I reach and poke the dried substance. It has hardened, and cracks, falling away at my touch.

I stare at the parched red fleck on my finger. It could easily be mistaken for paint if it wasn't for the smell.

 _Taste it._

I hate him, but I'm bringing my hand closer anyways.

 _Lick it._

He is demanding, he is heartless, he is the crimson-eyed monster in my worst dreams. The speck is on my lips, stuck there resting within the saliva on my bottom lip, jutting out to keep it as far from the inside of my mouth as I can get. It tingles in the worst way, like a hundred baby needles rapidly pecking at my lip.

That's how Jane finds me. With my bottom lip stuck out with a speck of dissolving, dried blood falling to my chin. She has an almost comical look on her face.

Demetri pops his head in after a second of silence.

"Toldja she'd barely gone 10 miles." He smirked.

When we reach the castle, Jane nods surreptitiously to Demetri, who smirks one more time before disappearing inside. I am alone with a witch twin.

She rounds the castle, and when I don't follow, a small jolt of pain rips through my head, crushing and snapping the skull. After glaring, I follow her.

"Why don't you take me back to my room?" I ask lowly.

Jane doesn't answer, so I just stare at the stitching of her pitch black cloak. She takes me to the garden.

It is beautiful, just like the rest of the building. Flowers of all kinds blossom and strive with color and life. Daisies, lilies, roses—so many roses, tulips, morning glories. A stone path wounds and curves throughout the garden with sculpted benches plotted in between the patches of buds. Jane sits at one of these benches and stares ahead, removing her hood so her pale brown hair was revealed. She doesn't need to say anything for me to know that I have to sit, too.

I am lost in a daydream of my human life—a rather melodramatic memory of my friends and I driving too fast down an empty highway, all too excited for homecoming and boys and Halloween and stressing over tests and teachers—when Jane speaks in her small, childish voice.

"Why are you not like us?" It's not rude, it's a genuine question. I might actually think she cared about me if it wasn't for the blank look in her eyes.

"Because I don't want to be." My answer is just as short as her question, with maybe a hint of conceit laced in the words. Jane smirks.

 _"Why?"_

She turns to me then, a child that couldn't have been more than fourteen, I'm sure of it, when turned. Something so small and fairy-like shouldn't be able to cause so much pain. I pursed my lips, swiveling the saliva around my mouth and licking the roof, coming up with an answer.

"Because I don't do well around blood. When I woke up after being changed, I was surrounded by it. By my own and…others'. There were men. I don't remember why I was on the floor, but I was." I take a deep breath, opening and closing my mouth several times, making little _acks_ and _cckk_ noises, as if I was choking. "I remember more of the months leading up to my transformation than my actual transformation."

"That's impossible." She challenges.

"It's not." I whip my head around, suddenly furious at her indifference. _She_ wanted to know my life, and now she's judging it? "It's bright and lurid and I want it. I don't want to leave it behind."

"Well you have to!" She squeals. She probably hadn't even started puberty before she was changed.

"No, I don't." I nearly whisper. "I don't have to accept this lifestyle. I already had enough foreign liquids in me. I don't need a million more just to stay alive."

"You were raped." She says it so simply. So fucking casually. Like she's known all along, and she takes pride in figuring it out all on her own. Or maybe I'm just really bad at hiding things.

"I wish that's all it was." Now she's confused. When she's not ruthlessly hurting people, she's fun to tease; the way her usually focused eyes narrow in thought and the how her nose crinkles up like a pug makes her look like the curious child she's supposed to be. I can kind of see Alec's affinity towards her. Or maybe I'm just a little sick. There's always too many maybes to take into account when figuring other people out.

"No one has a choice in this life, but you have to live it. And you have to live it normally. That means _drinking blood._ "

"Why are you so intent on this?" I ask, ignoring her seething frustration.

For a very long time, Jane doesn't say anything. She just stares at the garden walls, where ivy plants are encasing the stone in a shimmering green. Like my eyes.

"I was not liked as a human. I use this life to my advantage." This is all she says, probably the most I'm going to get out of her, but it's more than I knew an hour ago. Jane stands up, looking down at me like I'm an inferior being, and floats off before any human could think to blink.

 **xXx**

when we found crystal, she was naked. she doesn't remember this part of the story, much like how she doesn't remember being on the floor, so peaches and i never bring it up. i am wandering the castle, ignoring jane's rule to be escorted. fuck me if i'm being escorted anywhere. i know this castle so well i could've _designed_ it.

the thing with crystal is once she got past her initial vengeful state of mind, she was petrified. like she couldn't actually believe she was part of the undead now. the first thing she asked when we moved her into our home was if vampires got periods anymore. her thoughts are like spaghetti noodles.

i end up in the throne room. only caius and marcus are there, standing near the back and whispering intensely. they stop when they see me. caius' eyes are cold and soulless—just like they've always been. marcus looks at me without any discernable emotion, but he always looks like that.

"excuse me," i mutter scornfully, turning to head outside. caius is by my side in an instant, one hand on my throat, pushing me back into the wall.

"how much did you hear?" he growls, tightening his hold.

"nothing." i say with the air of the innocent—which i am, but it's fun to make caius squirm.

he was contentious even as a human, and rather emaciated. he rarely ate, causing his skin to be unhealthily sallow and his hair to turn that awful snow-white color. even his eyes had the deep blue washed out of them from lack of sleep and the responsibility his human life had demanded of him. he looked as ghostly as a human; caius has to be the only exception in the vampire world where being changed made him look more alive than dead.

"don't lie to me." he boils. his face, beautiful but evil, is centimeters from mine. i could trace my nose against his jaw if i really wanted. i laugh internally. the things athenodora doesn't know. heh.

"have aro search my thoughts if you're so paranoid about someone finding out about your secret pink underwear stash. my lips are sealed." i smirk, grasping his wrist and ripping his hand _off of my damn neck._ he was never this rough when he wanted answers before.

stunned, caius lets me walk off without any further confrontation, but i can feel the anger is radiating off of him. when i get to the garden, jane rudely pushes past me first.

"bitch." i whisper. but, ladies and gentlemen, vampires can perceive sound miles and miles and miles away from them, a fact that _has_ been proven courtesy of peaches when she heard what she thought was a young girl experiencing an orgasm, but turned out to be a male doctor-in-training experimenting with the birth pain simulator six miles from where we were.

jane whips around and immediately i feel a searing fire in my head, spreading to the tips of my fingers and calves, essentially engulfing me in flames. it is over in a matter of seconds, and i haven't had the focus to realize i was on my knees.

when i stand up again, jane is not looking at me. in fact, she looks utterly bored, disinterested in what she just did, like her first response was to hurt me, but now she's lost in thought of something far away and forgotten. she's forgotten me. she has the look of a poor child sulking after being told they couldn't have a toy. without a word, she turns, and struts towards her own room. if i didn't know the little witch, i'd have thought she was going to cry.

 **xXx**

I catch Amber's scent as she meanders towards the garden—exactly where I am coming from. The castle is cool and calm compared to the world outside these stone walls. My head spirals around Jane's conversation and the fading scent of blood from dinner, and I plan on just going back to my room and resting.

But, you know, Alec gets right in my fucking way just as I'm about to go up the stairs so that plan is no more.

He looks unhappy, a frown flawing his otherwise perfect face. "You're supposed to be escorted whenever you decide to roam the castle." He states, giving no emotion away.

"Jane just took me the garden and walked off. It's not _my_ fault the guard can't stay around long enough to escort me anywhere." I shot back, angry all over again at him and his tactics. "And who are you to tell me what I can and can't do Mr. Oh-Let-Me-Just-Shove-This-Blood-In-Our-Guest's-Face? Do you have any idea what that did to me?" I'm inching closer, trying to intimidate him, but he doesn't flinch, so now our bodies are almost touching. His face stays vacant, but the frown has turned into a straight line, and he kind of looks like he's holding back a laugh. Okay, he is holding a back a laugh; his tongue is peeking out of his lips. He has a tiny tongue. Okay, he's laughing.

"What the fuck are you laughing about?" I steam, clenching and unclenching my hands, aching to hit him.

"You're a vampire. And you hate blood." And he starts another laughing fit, only this time it's loud and disruptive and reminds me of a high school student giggling at the word 'penis.'

The more his laugher grows, the more furious I get. "It's not fucking funny!"

"It kind of is."

"No."

"Yes."

"No. What's funny is sending the blue turtle shell on that asshole in first place and then getting a mushroom power up so you gett blown up anyways." A tiny smile creeps on my face remembering Peaches' frustration at that.

Now Alec has stopped laughing, and a perplexed look is there instead of amusement. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

It's my turn to be confused. "It's Mario Kart."

"What's that?"

I clutch my dead heart and pretend to die all over again, huffing and sighing like a frantic British lady. "You—I—you—oh dear, oh goodness." I steady myself against the wall for effect, earning a bemused but entertained stare. "Mario Kart is only the single greatest video game in all of history. I would sell any remaining soul I have left for that game."

"What's a video game?"

Now he was getting on my nerves. I notice he's relaxed though; his posture is loose and one leg is crossed over the other. He's leaning against the wall, collected and comfortable. This is the most peaceful he's ever been around me. I mimic his movements, wanting to try it out. It doesn't feel right yet, and I return to my stiff stance, fidgeting.

"This electronic thing that people play for enjoyment. It's really fun, but it causes a lot of violent fights to break out at my house."

"Why?"

"Because we're competitive."

"Is this _electronic_ thing a contest?"

"Well, I mean, Mario Kart is a racing game played on a game console—the electronic thing—so the games are a contest, but the Wii is not."

"What's a Wii?"

"The game console."

"The console that allows you to play the racing game."

"Correct."

"Why's it called a Wii?"

The interrogation was going rather smoothly until that question came up. I let out the breath I had prepared in order to give an answer, and looked anywhere but his face, trying to come up with something sensible.

"I—I don't know." I said in a sort of awe. "I wasn't at the meeting."

"Why not?"

"That was sarcasm, Alec."

"Why?"

"It—I—it was meant to be a joke."

Alec seems to think for a long time, and he pokes his tiny tongue on the inside of his cheek so it looks like he's chewing on a jawbreaker. I stifle a snort.

"What?"

"You have a tiny tongue."

Alec looks appalled, then confused, then his face goes blank again, as if the conversation had never happened. "How did you see my tongue?" He asked curiously.

"When you were hiding your laugh at the fact that I don't drink blood. You stuck it out to keep from losing it."

Alec nods once, recalling the incident only mere minutes ago. Then he smiles again.

"Would you like to see the garden?" He asks suddenly.

"Were you not listening when I said that your sister just _escorted_ me there?"

He shrugged indifferently. "Must've missed it when you were mocking my tongue." He pouted. He actually fucking _pouted._ Like…bottom lip out and everything.

The more and more I talked to him, the more agitated I became. The childish attitude of someone that could send me into a blood frenzy in a second was not attractive or even remotely humorous. At all. Ever.

"Well then I'll say it again: Your sister just _escorted_ me to the garden."

"Why do you keep drawing out the word 'escorted?'"

Was he being serious? "Because I'm _mocking_ you!"

"You just did it again."

I grabbed the sides of my head in frustration, flailing my arms spastically in an attempt to convey my irritation before storming off.

"Where are you going?" He asked, running in front of me.

"To the fucking garden. Will you be _escorting_ me or not, Mr. Tiny Tongue?"

Alec _tsked,_ shaking his head and teasingly growling. "Such language _mon ange._ Master Aro will not be pleased to hear such foul sentences." Before asking what _ange_ meant, seeing as it was the second time Alec had called me it today, he took my hand and glided ahead towards the door I just came in through, pulling me along with more strength than I had, chuckling softly at my groans of protest.

The garden is even more beautiful at dusk. Everything is illuminated like fairy lights, and fireflies act as our torches until the moon appears, bathing the mini forest in shades of twilight and the sea. I inhale deeply. Alec sits us at the bench opposite the one Jane took me to, and the familiarity sets in as we sit there.

"You really are like your sister. Not the whole pain thing, but you both have a way of persuading people to feel trustworthy and calm." I ramble.

"Isn't that supposed to be that Cullen's ability?" He asks cockily. The Volturi and the Cullens don't appear to be on any beneficial terms together, and again I wonder what happened.

"Jasper?"

"The soldier."

"Yeah, that's him. He just influences our moods. What I'm saying is that you and Jane have, like, an aura about you that makes others feel secure."

"Or like they're about to be suffocated by a python." This is also very true, and I quickly decide that Jane's python-like personality largely outweighs the small amount of vulnerability she showed me today.

I turned to him, and like the garden when seen in the light of the moon, Alec is even more handsome at night. His pale skin contrasts to the black of the evening, making him stand out like an angel among tiny-horned devils. The sky amplifies his eyes—a swirl of dark red and ebony branches crawling towards his pupil. His hair is brushed out of the way, but it still falls to his eyebrows. He is gorgeous. And I still hate him. I hate him so much.

The red of his eyes should be mine. The calm of his mind should belong to me. The pure skin of his neck should be a part of me. When he looks at me, what would he see? What do _I_ look like under the moonlight? Probably like him—except for my fucking green eyes and the dried rash of my neck. Except for my paranoid thoughts and trembling body. We are a college graduate and a psycho next to each other. We don't belong in each other's world, even though we are the same species.

"Something wrong?" Alec asks without glancing at me.

I am so mad at myself and at him. I can feel it coming. The thirst. The need. _He_ is making me panic. Remembering his bloody hands on my face, my eyes, my lips…

Ignoring my lack of response, Alex continues. "Jane comes out here to think sometimes. I guess I do, too, but I prefer the library. I'll take you there tomorrow."

He has to feel my shaking. _He_ has to. He is a vampire—with the full sense of the word. He drinks _blood._ Oh my gosh, look at me, I'm Alec Volturi and I can drink blood. Whoopee!

"Aro has been thinking, too, I think. He has the idea that your intolerance to blood is a gift of some sort rather than a disorder." He shrugged. "I'm not sure what you are myself, but it _is_ interesting. No one can deny that."

 _Shut up. Shut up. Shutupshutupshutup._ I need him to stop talking. I need him away from me. I cannot handle his purity, his innocence, his _smell—_ I cannot stand this perfect vampire sitting next to me, behaving without a care in the world. It's like putting an average high school girl next to a Victoria's Secret model. It is driving me nuts and a spider web of insecurities interweaves itself into my brain.

Finally, he looks at me, and his eyes only widen a little at my state. My knees to my chin, quivering horribly. Carefully, he reaches his hand out again, but all he does is stroke my hair.

"It'll get easier. I promise." He croons, petting me. He's fucking _petting_ me. " _Mon ange."_

I am incapable of asking what that means, so instead I just purr lightly under his touch, trying to sedate myself. It comes out sounding more like a dehydrated whinny. His touch is soft and deceiving, filled with control and sanity.

Then, abruptly, he pulls away as if I'd shocked him. At the same time, I jump back, nearly falling off the bench. I felt it, too. Alec stands up and shuffles away from me, all forms of intimacy gone.

"Whoa…" He mutters, holding the hand that was caressing me. I choke out a tearless sob.

He felt the warmth.

Out of all the crevices and caves within my body, my organs, my skin, two small surfaces of skin felt warm. The cold of being dead had left.

When Alec started petting me, I had _blushed._


	7. Chapter 6

Chapter Six

 _"_ _According to you  
I'm stupid,  
I'm useless,  
I can't do anything right"_

-"According to You," _Orianthi_

Dreams. Dreams of eating pizza and falling asleep in class and running and breathing hard and spilling paint and burning tongues on coffee and reading books and playing soccer and puking—real, slimy, chunky, green puke—and licking popsicles and jumping on trampolines and peeing and swimming and dying from doing too many pushups and drinking Gatorade and peeing again and laughing in a car and watching scary movies and having campfires and sleeping in late and jamming to music and petting dogs and making out and wearing cool socks and popping gum and chasing geese and biting nails and being human.

I have the dreams of those that are still living. They swirl in front of my closed eyes, never sleeping, never really dreaming. Only wishing. Like colors in the visible spectrum, I can only see dreams inside the wavelength. I can never touch them, like I will never see the colors outside the visible spectrum. I am trapped in my own hellish rainbow.

It is only my second day in Volterra, and if anything, I have only gotten worse.

My cheeks burn. Even though I asked Amber and Peaches to feel them, and they assured me we were the same temperature, they still felt like fireworks going off, hot and heated and _pink._ Amber saw though. Even if she didn't feel it, she knows. She saw.

And she is panicking.

"Did Alec do anything beforehand? What were you thinking about? Maybe it's a mental thing, and you can control it. It doesn't have to mean anything. It could be a gift. Did it hurt? Did it hurt him? Was he cold? Or warm? Did you feel it before or after he touched you? Did he touch your cheeks or just your hair? Was it—"

"Amber!"

She stopped pacing and looked at Peaches, bewildered.

"Calm down."

"How? She's getting worse, not better! We never should have come back here." Already Amber had walked away from Peaches, and was searching for things to pack, but we were in my room, and she wasn't about to start throwing _my_ things into bags and suitcases.

"Maybe this is part of the process. I mean…blushing…involves…blood." Peaches ended lamely.

"If blood is rushing to her cheeks, does that mean it's flowing through other parts of her body as well?" They both stopped to look at me, as if I would have the answer. We all listened, but my body was as dead as ever; no heartbeat; no breathing; no blood flow.

"I wish I'd been there. God, I wish I'd been there." Amber repeated, resting her head in her hands. The stress I was causing them made me feel sick, and I stood up, intending to go through the endless corridors in search of a small, quiet room to think, when there were three swift knocks on my door. Alec enters.

Amber is alert, but not in a bellicose way. She is curious and wide-eyed, looking at Alec as if he were an alien.

Peaches is more cautious, glaring hard and putting her hand on my lower back.

Alec doesn't seem nervous, but he does avoid eye contact and shifts occasionally. "I came to see if Crystal would like to see the library. Master Aro thinks calming her from last night's incident will ease her…irrationality."

The buttons of his coat are undone, leaving him dressed in a black turtleneck and black dress pants. The Volturi crest hung loosely around his throat.

Peaches is about to protest, so I quickly step forward and shake my head. "Sure. I could use some reading. Will you be staying?"

"It is my job to escort you anywhere you go and escort you back."

My anticipation deflates, and now I wished I'd let Peaches say no. The last thing I want is Alec hovering over me, _not_ blushing, _not_ breathing, and essentially just being the perfect little vampire while I browse through books.

I make my sigh loud and deliberate, but it doesn't faze Alec, who turns around and starts leading the way through the castle, never looking back once to see if I'm following or not.

 **xXx**

when they have gone, i turn to peaches. "why didn't you say anything?" i demand.

"why didn't you?"

i suppose we are both to blame, but in my defense, i was only interested in learning everything i could about the boy that has begun humanizing our crystal. i have replayed the event over and over and over again in my head until it's all i can see. crystal in a state of panic. crystal being stroked by that monster. crystal blushing. now, i got to see the past through alec's eyes.

he was lulled by the tranquility of the night, but that's still no excuse to be touching crystal the way he was. looking into his past, i can see he has spent countless evenings outside with his sister, and even countless more in the library. he reads all the time. memory after memory of his learning, his concentration, and his soundness while reading skip and run through my head. but i am not interested in that. i am not interested in the human side of things.

i want last night. i want to know what happened. reaching into more recent memories, i finally found it. alec wasn't paying any attention to crystal. in fact, he barely remembered she was there. and then, a spark. he never touched her cheeks, but he's a vampire, and we are able to feel the body temperatures of anything we touch. one second he's staring off into space, absentmindedly soothing someone who was as dead as he. the next second, she's burning, there is blood flow. she's _alive._

"we need to call carlisle."

 **xXx**

I eventually catch up with Alec, though I'm in no hurry to. He is moody and inconsistent with absolutely zero regard for the wellbeing or whereabouts of others, as demonstrated by his lack of observation of my admiring and touching nearly every painting we pass, breaking one of Jane's many useless rules. The library is located beneath the castle, through a montage of tunnels and passageways, all leading to seemingly empty rooms.

It is enormous. Books of every genre from every time period line the walls, which never seem to stop climbing. Leather-bound, hardback, ARCs, paperbacks, collectibles—it is any bookworm's perfect dream.

"Wow." I state.

Alec nods once, a small smile creeping onto his face. "Master Aro has acquired a very impressive collection. My personal favorites are the Greek myths, right over there." Alec points to a corner of the room illuminated by small candles, but I can't distinguish the genres from one another. However, each book smells differently; some are clean and crisp and fresh, and others smell like smoke and ashes, so I assume the older copies are amongst those that smell like woodland creatures.

We each mosey around, and Alec gives a proud and excited description of each section.

"Jane is an awfully big fan of Shakespeare, so those aisles over there are filled with him. We have at least thirty different copies of _Romeo and Juliet_ alone. I, personally, have no interest in the ridiculous sonnets and plays that speak of love and tragedy." He muses, full of pride. "Master Caius is fond of philosophy, especially from the Renaissance, so towards the back corner are works from Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Dante. He mostly keeps his books in his own room though."

"Where are the contemporaries?" I ask.

"You'll have to be more specific. From World War II on, there have been several literary movements that would qualify the works of their decade as contemporary novels."

Even though I still hate him, his passion for literature astounds me, and I can't help but have a small inkling of respect for his enthusiasm. "John Green?"

Alec thinks for a minute, doing that weird tongue thing again, then slouches uncharacteristically and frowns. "Oh. You're one of them. Come."

He's back to being an asshole. "Um, excuse me." I demand, again having to catch up with him. "What do you mean _one of them?"_

He shrugs. "You know, the _new generation._ The youthful one full of teenage girls that have nothing better to do than read works of the uncultured and untalented in order to get a rise out of unrealistic romance."

His words are careless and insensitive, like he's made this speech a million times. He never looks at me while talking either, his red eyes (which have begun darkening, but I don't say anything) wander up and down the aisles of books instead.

"You've sure got a lot of –un words going on in there. How about being _undaunted_ to try something new for once?"

"You're doing it again."

"Doing what?"

"That mocking thing."

"Well, that's because you're being a dipshit. John Green happens to be my _favorite_ author of all time. Have you ever read _Looking for Alaska?"_

"As a matter of fact, I have." He stopped in front of an aisle marked _Teen Fiction A-G._ He is smirking again, challenging me. His posture is relaxed as it had been yesterday, and that puts me at ease. "As well as your over-sensationalized _Fault in Our Stars, Paper Towns, An Abundance of Katherines,_ and even his works that he co-wrote such as _Will Greyson, Will Greyson_ and _Let it Snow."_ He grins triumphantly. "And I can say the same for all of them: they plainly suck."

Anger and disbelief well up inside me. Every word that comes out of his mouth is mean and not nice and makes me wanna hit him. I get up on my tip-toes, trying and failing to reach his height. He couldn't have been more than fifteen or sixteen when changed. He is still a child, but he is still taller than me by at least two inches. "You suck, Alec. You suck hard. TFIOS is about cancer! And love! And loving people through cancer! And pedophilic swing sets!"

"All things that exactly prove my point. Unrealistic. Uncultured. Untalented. Sucky."

"You suck."

"That's impossible. I'm straight."

And I lose it.

Despite being in a library, we had begun yelling at each other, and now, I was laughing even louder than I had been shouting. As a human, some girls called my laugh a giggle, but my dad identified it for what it was: loud snorting, similar to a pig's.

My laugh seems to only make Alec laugh because the minute I pause, he is laughing and holding his hand over his mouth to try and stifle it.

"How have you managed to obtain a laugh like _that_ after being transformed? Being changed is supposed to make you _more_ attractive." He asks in between chuckles. His laugh is deep and resonant, a teenage boy laugh. He is trying to stand tall and act professional, but the hand covering his mouth shakes with mirth.

"I don't need your sass right now!"

"You need _someone's_ sass if you honestly think John Green is a worthy author."

He was pushing it. Oh man, was he pushing it. "Fine! You're on! Give me an hour and I'll prove to you his writing is as beautiful as Demetri's ass!"

Stunned silence followed, and I immediately clamp my hand over my mouth, shocked at what I just said. Alec looked at me disapprovingly, but I am doubled over, holding my mouth so tight in order to keep the "giggles" from springing free.

After a full minute of me kneeling on the floor, hand over my mouth, shaking with silenced laughter, I explain.

"Peaches says some very interesting things in the shower sometimes."

 **xXx**

"amber? what is it? has something gone wrong?"

peaches and i have traveled to the city to get cell service after a very long and uncommonly insulting argument with felix, who is apparently still pissed about the whole fairy thing. oh well.

"no, no carlisle. well, i mean, yes, but it's not _wrong_ wrong. it's more like, well um…"

peaches rolls her eyes and takes the phone from me impatiently. "crystal still hasn't eaten. but she, um, last night she was with alec and she…blushed."

a silence follows, and after a few minutes, we can hear carlisle mumble something with another female in the background. "i know renesmee, but the thing is she's not a hybrid like you."

"carlisle? what's wrong? do we need to be concerned?" peaches asks hurriedly.

there is more shuffling, and finally he comes back to the phone. "girls," he starts, "i think…maybe our earlier predictions may have…some validity to them."

"which predictions? did i really bite her wrong?" i panic, seizing the phone. i wander away from peaches, under the canopy of a nearby restaurant, with my hand to my ear and unshed tears gathering in my eyes.

"has aro contributed anything?"

"no! it's been a day and they've nearly killed her! alec forced her to drink blood."

"she drank it?" carlisle asks, appalled.

"well, no. i mean, we were all eating and he got so close to her with blood on his fingers and—just—no she's never had blood. but carlisle, what earlier predictions?"

he sighed, but remained calm, though the strain was clear in his voice. "i think something may have gone wrong in the transformation process. the thing is—see—renesmee obviously possesses nearly every attribute you've described for crystal. renesmee blushes, her eyes are chocolate brown, she can—has—survived without blood for extended periods of time. but she is half human. crystal is…"

"she's not human." i whisper, almost desperately, begging. "they will kill her if she is."

this seems to awaken something in carlisle, who is immediately retracting his previous claim. "i'm not saying she is by any means. venom runs through her veins, her heart is dead, her body is frozen at 15. it's clear she's a vampire, but maybe alec…maybe he awakens something else in her. certain parts of being human without fully _living._ "

"what? carlisle, i don't understand."

i can see him squinching his face up in concentration, trying to find the words, comforting words. i can picture him biting his knuckles, eyebrows furrowed, trying to decipher something like a calculus problem. "have you considered alec and crystal being mates?"

 **xXx**

 _"'_ _You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it'll be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.'_ How is that not beautiful to you?"

Alec shrugged like he usually does when he's contemplating his thoughts. "It's boring. It's basically saying we're in a maze forever and that forever only lasts as long as we keep hating our lives now."

We are seated on the floor of the library. John Green, Sarah Dessen, Shakespeare and the Brontë sisters surround us. We have made a mess out of the aisles of immaculacy. He is seated more professionally than I am, for my legs are propped against a shelf and my head is resting on my palm on the floor by Alec's hip. His legs are stretched out in front of him, crossed over one another, and a clean, obnoxious pile of books is stacked on his left. He pages through _Wuthering Heights_ gracefully as I bend and fold pages of _Looking for Alaska._

"Okay, how 'bout this?" I ask, skimming each chapter. Alec rolls his eyes for the twenty-fourth time as I prepare to read another quote. _"'And what is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is an_ instant? _Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pains_ feels _particularly instantaneous.'"_

For a long while after finishing the paragraph, Alec is silent, paging through his book but his eyes aren't reading it, aren't absorbing anything.

I can name three times in my vampire life that I have wished for Amber's ability. The first time was when the man that escaped from prison was changed. He had been awaiting death row for some time now for rape and assault, and in his fleeing, became someone's newborn. The vampire that changed him, though I don't know his name, was a close friend of Peaches, so I knew his whereabouts before any police could even begin to question how he escaped. I remember watching the news, seeing his human face, and hating him. I wanted to see what made him the way he was, and how weak he looked before being changed. I wanted to delve into his teenage years, and decode the reasoning for his tattoos, his aggression, and his gang symbols. He didn't deserve to be alive, and that sickening disgust sparked the first of many breakdowns.

The second time was when Amber was out hunting near an elementary school. I was waiting for her to finish, leaning against a tree by the playground and listening to music. Being 15, I hardly looked out of place. The school day finished, and children swarmed out like bees released from a jar. Children's blood is typically more appealing than older humans. It is fresher, more oxygenated, and always circulating. Not that any living human's blood doesn't circulate, but children are so energetic, so lively. So ready to live life. Several teachers came out, among them being a vampire. She was beautiful, and impressively very controlled. So many children, and she barely bared her teeth except to smile at parents. I wanted to know her story. I wanted to know if she had had blue eyes or brown. I wanted to know if she'd always loved children, or if it was something she developed after being changed. There were too many stories out there for there to be any more blank pages, but as soon as Amber returned, full and red-eyed again, that's all that lovely schoolteacher was. Another blank page.

The third time was right now. Seeing Alec ponder things he's had centuries to think about with such rigidity and focus only made me wanna see him limp and slouch and be _human_ more than ever. I want to know how attractive he was. Was he ugly as shit or okay-looking? Did he have acne or brush his hair? Did _anyone_ brush their hair when Alec was alive? I stare at him for what feels like hours, waiting for his approval.

"It's funny to see humans perceive time." He finally settles on saying.

"Please elaborate."

"That's all they think about. Time. Dates. Deadlines. Years. How many years until they retire? How many more years of schooling do they have? How long before they get married? At what age is it too late to have kids? It's all just so human and asinine."

I sit up, righting myself and sitting crisscross-applesauce. "Well, yeah. They have to think like that. They're humans. They don't have an eternity like us."

"It's ridiculous. Because like Miles considers, it can be over in an instant, but an instant is different for everyone. It can be five minutes or ten years. Someone's child can grow up in an instant. How long is that? How long does it take to die? How long does it take for your lungs to collapse or your heart to stop beating? It's never just an _instant._ " He's getting angry, slamming his book down and turning so his full body is facing me. I instinctively shrink back, his sixteen-year-old body dwarfing my petite frame.

"And that's what makes humans so—so— _stupid!_ They want the most preposterous things and seek the most unrealistic relationships. They don't have _forever_ to find their soul mate and they don't have _forever_ to buy the perfect home and live the perfect life, so they should just stop wasting their pathetic lives wanting and wanting and wanting and _just do it."_

His eyes are livid. He is still on the floor, but in an instant—er, um, in a second—he could be up and fighting. I am shocked by his speech. The usually impassive one is riled, pissed, passionate about _something._ It's the most I've ever seen of Alec and his interests.

After I still haven't said anything, Alec settles back in his flawless position, and asks calmly, "Are you hungry?" as if nothing happened. He is back to being my escort.

It is an idiotic question, since I am _always_ hungry, so I answer, "You know what your problem is? You're so damn _bored_ with your life right now you have to invent things to bitch about. You're just angry that _you_ never did anything fulfilling during your human life that you have to criticize them now."

"I was condemned as a witch with my sister and burned at the stake when I was sixteen!" He explodes. "We told time by looking at the sun set! I never limited my days—the very few days I had as a human—to priorities! I was timeless as a human, Crystal!"

"Uh-huh, okay. And how long did you burn for, Alec? Let's think about what Miles said. Was all that timelessness instantly lost when you burned? Did it hurt, Alec? Were those seconds long and painful, or was it all _instantaneous?_ Did—"

All of a sudden his hands are around my throat and I am against the wall. I don't need to breathe, but the constriction makes me uncomfortable and I struggle, breaking his wrist and bolting out the door. He is by my side the minute I'm out of the library, and soon we are two winds dancing: tackling, biting, clawing, punching.

"Crystal! Alec!" I hear some voice in the distant, but I ignore it.

That is, I ignore it until my favorite person in the _whole_ world sends a boiling, hammering pain through my whole body. Alec, who is beneath me, pushes me off, and I lay there on the floor, watching in agony as he straightens himself and makes his way over to his sister standing at the end of the tunnel. Jane is smirking, and I expected Alec to be too, but his mouth is set in a deep frown. He never looks at me until Aro and Marcus rush in moments later.

 **xXx**

"amber! peaches! come quickly! crystal and alec have had a…dispute." demetri commands softly, finding us in the city.

"i gotta go, carlisle, but we'll be in touch." i hang up before he can answer and follow demetri back to the castle.

alec and crystal are unhurt. or if they were hurt they have healed.

"what happened?" peaches demands.

like children, crystal and alec just glare at each other, refusing to answer. peaches repeats her question, stomping her foot and shattering part of the wall to make her point.

"we had different views on humans." crystal mumbles. alec nods once. i am perusing his past when aro speaks.

"alec!" he scolds, and alec hangs his head lower like a whipped dog. "how dare you treat our guest as you have. we are here to _help_ them, not _fight_ them." aro is unhinged, quickly going from chastising him to acting as a mediator for him and crystal. "instead of ripping each other's heads off—literally—why don't we try communicating what's wrong?" he smiles sickeningly sweet between crystal and alec. he is about to say more when marcus steps forward and places his hand on aro's shoulder, intending to show him something. aro takes his hand, still smiling like a pedophile, and searches his brother's thoughts.

meanwhile, i pry into alec's past, no matter how much he protests it. every second that passes makes me madder and madder until i'm clenching my fists so hard i draw blood. it started off so simple, so innocent. how it evolved into physical fighting is beyond me.

but there is something i absorb from alec, and the deeper i go, the more he hisses and growls at me. there is an attraction to crystal. the resentment and annoyance he feels for her is nothing more than a mask of denial. i want to fucking punch him. the ass has a _crush_ on my crystal.

suddenly the idea of them being mates repulses me more than ever, and i quickly look into crystal's mind to see how she feels. good. lots and lots and lots of wrath and disgust is associated with him.

aro finishes his mind molestation, and turns to us all with a grave look.

"i think we all need a little break from each other. jane, please escort these three ladies back to their rooms. alec, if you'll stay a minute please. master caius, marcus and i need to discuss something with you."


	8. Chapter 7

**Author's Note: Prone to editing, this was rushed.**

Chapter Seven

 _"_ _But what I found was a castle on a cloud,_

 _'_ _Cause you took me there and lay me on a broken bed,_

 _No air, and there were cobwebs falling in my hair,_

 _I swear, I would have died for you"_

-"Castles," Of Verona

As soon as Jane is alone with us in our room, she pushes me against the wall. What is with these vampires and walls? It's not like I couldn't break it if I wanted to.

"What did you do to my brother?" She whispers lowly.

Amber yanks her back, but Jane holds her ground.

"Nothing! Your brother went crazy after I read a quote from a dumb book about teenage love!"

"Why were you reading those books in the first place?" She shouts.

"I. WAS. BORED. Goodness gracious, I'm _so_ fucking sorry I was born twenty-eight years ago to a time period where the media is stupid and Shakespeare's dead and in his place are unrealistic love stories! That's no excuse for Alec to be trying to kill me!"

"He has every right to try and kill you! People like you, vampires and humans alike, are the reason so many marriages fail and why so many people fall in love for the wrong reasons and why so many lives are ruined today." She's lowered her voice, but the poison is still dripping from her lips. Silent and deadly. Peaches and Amber are blurs in the background, even more confused than I am at Jane's sudden empathetic outburst.

"What do those things have to do with anything at all? It's not like you ever _leave_ the castle to know what's going on in the world. All you Volturi people do is sit around and kill others, and you have the audacity to defend the mundane existence of ordinary people's problems? The absolute and only reason we're here is so Aro can play his little mind tricks and figure out why I'm like the first mermaid to grow legs. What's _wrong_ with you?"

A few strands of hair have fallen in my face, and I brush them away waiting for an answer. But Jane never answers. Instead, she purses her lips and looks down, ashamed. The gesture makes her age prominent, and if it were under any other circumstances, I would have the urge to come forth and hug the small child.

"You're just like them. You're just like the rest. You don't know what my brother and I have been through." It sounds like she's crying even though we both know that's impossible, but there is a clear layer of sadness to her tone, and, as if her painful ability was converted to the auspicious powers of Jasper or Corin, a sense of calm swept over everyone in the room as she turns to leave.

"What the hell was that about?" I ask. "What is going on?"

Amber and Peaches are silent, processing everything that's happened.

"Crystal," Peaches starts in her superior voice, the voice someone would use when giving a speech about abortion, "I'm going to go hunt. I need to get out of here. Come with me."

She is not asking me to hunt with her, but I can tell there is something serious to talk about. I give a small smile at Amber, who returns it tiredly, and follow Peaches out the window. The afternoon sun beats down uncomfortably on my skin as we flit and fly through the land. It almost burns, but when I look down, expecting to see a blanket of flame on my arm, there are only diamonds in place instead.

We pass people, and Jane's outburst comes rolling back into my thoughts. How many of these humans were going through a divorce right now? How many fell asleep at night wondering if they were loved or not? And how many really mattered to creatures like us anyway? I can understand Jane's views, but at the same time I fail to see why someone like her would be concerned in the first place.

And Alec. Alec would care more about the wellbeing of a rat turd than he would any human and their romantic issues.

I climb a tree, leaning against the enormous trunk and letting the light breeze of the dry city encapsulate me. I can hear Peaches eating; the breaking of bones sounds like snapping celery in half. The sound is slightly soothing.

Peaches has always had a thing for necrophilia, so when I hear a shirt being removed, I can only assume she has finished her meal and is commencing her sadomasochistic practices. The sounds of a body being torn apart increase, and quickly the soothing hums turn to echoes of pleasure and blood.

The whole ordeal barely lasts ten minutes, at which time Peaches has redressed, and slinks up the tree to me, blood splattered on her face like exploded paintballs.

"Hi."

"Hi."

"Crystal, do you know…about the state we found you in when you were dying?"

A thousand memories rush through my mind, all of which could never come together to form even the slightest picture of what happened.

"No."

"You were naked." There is a sad quality to her voice, like she is exhausted and sick of living. I throw one arm up over my head, gripping a branch.

"How scandalous."

"The smell of blood was overwhelming. All sorts. Brain blood. Mouth blood. Stomach blood…vagina blood. You were a dying deer just begging to be ripped apart and devoured."

"Geez, thanks."

"But Crystal, you refused to die. You refused to let go. That's what's so amazing. The men in the room—"

"Where was I?" I ask.

"In a basement. You really don't remember?"

A thousand lights dance in front of my eyes, like a hallucinating movie. I remember everything but my transformation. I remember being locked in the basement for months. Maybe years. I remember man after man using me, violating me. I remember belts and knives and hot needles. I remember my body being torn to pieces. I remember things being shoved inside of me that were never supposed to enter my virgin holes. But I don't remember how I got on the floor.

In response, I shrug.

"Amber and I saw you around school. We never really considered you. You'd been on the news for about a year—maybe more. The missing girl. Stolen from the sidewalk walking home from school, every parent's horror story."

"I know. I was terrified. They threw me in the back of the car and started groping me—"

"You don't know who those men were." Peaches forcefully chokes out. I turn to her, cautious.

"Does it matter? They're dead." I had ended them. Tied them down and made them feel the pain I had. I destroyed them nearly one week after I had been destroyed. The control…there was none. Blood on the walls, the floor, the sink and the bed. I had danced in it, giddy with dismantling them and too distracted in doing to so see the mess I'd caused.

"They were part of the Quileute Tribe."

My skin turns to ice. The idea of me blushing now seemed entirely unfathomable as my body frosted over like a lake in winter, deader than those men.

"You mean…like, with Amber?"

"Well, she hadn't been with them yet, but yes. The same people."

"Not Jacob though, right? Not Sam and Embry?"

Peaches shook her head. "No, no. This was twenty-five or -six years ago, but the men that took you were werewolves."

Absorbing this new information makes a sick feeling come over me all over again. On top of starving, Alec's assholey ways, and the constant worry Peaches and Amber have for me, this breaks it. Peaches pats my back as I vomit an acidic charcoal-colored slime, which sizzle as it touches the branch of the tree. I feel raw and—and—

"Not all of them were werewolves, but half of them were."

"That doesn't make any sense!" I insist, feeling ready to puke again. "They're not…it's not…"

"Just because you never hear anything bad about them doesn't mean there _isn't_ anything bad. There were hundreds of other members after Taha Aki, Crystal." Her voice hardens, and even though she tries to hide it, the disgust for werewolves is there. It's inevitable; my tiny coven follows the stereotypical path of being natural enemies of werewolves. "Vampires are portrayed as the bad ones, the reason for the Third Wife's sacrifice. We're _manic,_ we're _bloodthirsty,_ but Crystal it's not entirely us that's wrong!"

"What the fuck does this have to do with me, with my situation right now?" I ask calmly, steering the conversation back to the problem. It doesn't matter if the werewolves raped people two days ago or two hundred years ago—their only connection to me was through Amber, who apparently wasn't even part of the pack when they raped me, so really what was Peaches getting at?

She sighed deeply, tossing her long black hair behind her shoulder. "I'm just saying. Maybe it had something to do with how you were transformed. Maybe werewolf semen affected your body."

"How? How could the Quileute Tribe affect my transformation? Are we even sure that's what's wrong with me?"

Peaches looked away from me, out at the sunny city. "We're pretty sure. We called Carlisle—"

"When?!"

She waved her hand dismissively. "Like, not even thirty minutes ago. It was right before you and Alec got into a fight. He said maybe Alec had something to do with the way you are, that _something—_ we don't know what—happened when you were bitten that didn't make you fully…undead."

Fear seizes my entire body, eradicating any hope that I would one day be normal and any doubt that I _was_ normal. "You're saying…I'm not entirely vampire. You're saying…I'm half human?"

Peaches shook her head, stressed. "Not even that. Alec may... _awaken_ the human side of you for whatever reason. Carlisle suggested it was a mate thing, but—"

"WE ARE NOT MATES!" I explode, repulsed and outraged at the idea. Alec and I were two dogs at each other's throats. We were summer and winter, fire and ice, Mario and Bowser. He fuels the hate I have for everything I am. He. Makes. Me. Hate. Myself. That is _not_ what mating, what _loving_ each other is.

"We don't know for sure Crystal! It's a guess! You're so fucked up it's all we can do at this point! Alec did something that made you live— _really live_ —for a moment, Crystal, don't you get it? You. Become. Human. Around. Him. Something went wrong in the transformation process that gave you the ability to become human when you're around your mate!" Peaches huffed.

I sat back against the trunk of the tree, ready to cry, ready to die. Alec, my mate, making me human. The idea consumes me, and before I know it, I'm—I'm...

"Crystal!"

I'm crying. Real, wet slippery tears. They are coating my cheeks in soft, iced droplets. Salty. And I'm struck with the odd notion of just how similar blood and tears are.

Peaches is hyperventilating, eyes wide, in a defensive stance. "That means he's close. Alec. He came looking for you. Oh my God." She leaves then, running through the fields towards the castle where my lovely _mate_ was departing from. To come and find me. Crying real, hot, disgusting tears in a tree in Italy. The thought makes me cry even harder.

 **xXx**

i am sitting in our room after peaches and crystal leave when jane comes back in, head hung low, and apology hanging off her lips. she needlessly inhales and exhales several times before leaning against the wall and saying simply, "i'm sorry."

i nod, indicating it's okay even though we both know it's not. silence encapsulates the room before i speak.

"why did alec get so mad? in all fairness, crystal has a point. besides aro and caius, no one here has a mate or really understands…those feelings. why would alec get so mad about something he doesn't understand?" i ask, sincerely curious. it takes a minute for jane to answer, but when she does, her voice is filled with sorrow.

"my brother has been desperate for a mate for so long— _so many years._ he's looked, he's ached, but we aren't allowed to leave, so he's never been very successful." jane suddenly turned sharply towards me, hands clenched; I instinctively leaned back for fear of her power. "And now suddenly the one— _the one_ —shows up, presented right in front of him like a Christmas present, and he not only doesn't know how to bring up to her that she's his mate, but she's a fucked up mate too!" i'm about to protest, but jane continues, not angry, but distressed more than anything.

"you don't know how long he's waited, now she comes and he can _feel_ it. he knows there's something different about her—and sure shit there is—and she _hates_ him. i take it you don't have a mate? you don't know how heartbreaking it is to watch your love hate you when you didn't even do anything!"

i interject, just to say something, to defend crystal's choice. "alec was pushing her too hard. he was making her do things she wasn't ready to do. yes, i know she's messed up, but that's the whole reason we're here! to get her un-messed up! and with the temper alec has, i'd say he's no more messed up than crystal! _of course_ she's gonna resent him!"

silence again for another ten minutes. we are both deep in thought, and i look into her past to pass the time. she was adorable. freckles and dirty blonde hair and eyes paler than the sky. the sadistic vampire that sits in front of me now with flawless features and crimson eyes cannot possibly be the carefree little girl she used to be. jane is too grown up now, and has seen and done too much. this life has ruined her.

amongst her past physical appearances, i see more locked memories. her and alec playing together, pranking neighbors who thought they were witches. i see and feel her agony at being burned, and aro rescuing them just in time. i see her transformation, how excited she it, and i see alec's frightened and numbing state. it's no wonder they are the way they are now.

jane wants to speak, wants to say something in defense of her brother, but she turns up empty. i know she cares for him, and i know behind that evil façade, the compassionate side of jane only wants to see alec happy. she leaves just as peaches and crystal return.

 **xXx**

Alec finds me moments after Peaches leaves. He climbs the tree silently, delicately, like he's afraid he's intruding. He is. Then he's sitting in front of me, a sixteen-year-old boy, shy and uncertain. I try not to glare.

Very quickly, his hesitation turns to confusion. "Have—have you been crying?" He asks, staring at my wet cheeks. I nod uselessly. "How?"

"You." I whisper, mad at myself. Mad at him. Mad at everything.

He looks down, picking at the Volturi crest that he never takes off. "I made you cry?"

I nod again, looking past him. "Just like you made me blush."

He swallows, taking this in. "What am I doing to you?" He whispers.

"Isn't it obvious?" I ask mockingly, intending to hurt him, wanting him to know what he's putting me through. "You're turning me human."

He turns the idea of me being human over and over again; I can see it in his eyes. Before he can say anything, I continue. "And I hate you for it. I came here to get _help,_ and instead I come to find my mate playing his fucking vampire tricks on me and turning me into a damn _human,_ which, of course are just _so inferior to our—oh, sorry—your species so I don't even know why we're mates in the first place. I hate you."_

"I'm not doing it on purpose!" He stammers.

"Doesn't matter. It's happening. Before you know it, I'll be breathing too. I'll be able to drown. I'll sleep. I'll be warm _all over._ And by the time I have a heartbeat, you'll realize just how pathetic I am, how worthless, how disgraceful I am. A vampire turning human, and you'll hate me too."

"I could never hate you." He whimpers. He is acting like a child, but doesn't he see what he's doing? How it can never happen, how it will never happen, when the inevitable is right in front of us?

"Bullshit. When I'm human, you'll just wanna eat me." I jump down from the tree, blinking back those awful real tears that still shed anyways, and run back to the castle, leaving Alec alone in the outskirts of Italy.


	9. Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

 _"_ _Has no one told you she's not breathing?"_

-"Hello," Evanescence

Aro summons us when Peaches and I return, and the three of us make our way to the throne room in silence. Once there, we are greeted by the three kings and the guard. Only Aro seems happy to see us, as always.

"Ladies!" He exclaims jovially. "How lovely it is to see you!"

We all nod once in acknowledgement, but inside, we are all terrified. The more human I become, the higher the chance I will just be another meal to Aro, who rushes forwards and takes Peaches' hand in his own, seeing everything that just occurred in the last hour.

"I'm sorry about the dispute our beautiful Crystal has had with Alec." Is he still referring to the book argument? That seems like ages ago. "—but I think it's safe to say things have been…resolved." Out of the corner of my eye, I see Alec shift awkwardly, and Aro grins like the Mad Hatter.

"Although, there still is the issue of your eating habits, Crystal."

I don't offer any type of reaction, and I feel Amber shift beside me, trying to hide her discomfort.

"However!" Aro continues, ignoring our lack of response. "I think it's obvious we have come to certain…conclusions…about our young starving girl." With that, Aro—still maintaining that sick grin on his face—steps back and for the first time since I've been here, Marcus stands up and comes forward. As he slowly makes his way down the steps dramatically, Aro hovers over Alec's addled form, whispering softly like a possessive demon giving instructions to its host, and nudges him forwards. Marcus and Alec stand only a foot in front of us, waiting.

"Crystal," Marcus begins. His voice is much softer, less enthused than Aro's. In fact, it is almost the perfect opposite; there is no emotion, no judgment, no tone. There is _nothing._ "I have not felt a bond this strong since I encountered the Cullen couple, Bella and Edward. This bond may even be…stronger." He whispers.

I try to stop it, I really do, but the blood rushes to my cheeks as everyone in the room looked between me and Alec. And while they were doing that, I could sense them becoming appalled that I was even blushing in the first place, which only makes me blush harder. The whole ordeal is very exhausting.

"You don't eat…because you don't have to." Marcus continues in that monotone voice, looking off in the distance. "The bond between you and Alec," now he looked at me straight in the eyes, my pretty, pretty green eyes, "is unparalleled. In essence, this bond is so strong, that you have been able to mentally survive off of _Alec's_ diet since you have turned." Now everyone was looking at me curiously or, in Demetri's case, with _fear._ And truth be told, I was terrified myself.

"You mean Crystal can survive without eating because she's been relying on Alec's eating habits her whole life? Like a fetus surviving off of their mother? What does that even mean! It creates more questions than it answers!" Amber exclaims.

 _"_ _It means,"_ Aro suddenly interjects just as Marcus was about to explain, "in the simplest of terms: Crystal becomes vampire; she is not _full_ vampire due to werewolf interference; while Crystal's vampire side is struggling to maintain control, Alec feeds here and those nutrients transfer to Crystal's body, keeping her alive; Alec becomes desperate for a mate; desperation awakens something in Crystal; eyes turn green; Crystal comes here; the proximity to the girl he's been unknowingly taking care of her whole vampire life disturbs the rest of the human side of Crystal. And before we know it, Alec has turned this girl almost completely human. He was the final puzzle piece she needed." With each word, with each ensuing explanation, the tension in the room thickens like a blood clot, pulsing and accumulating until not a single soul can break the imminent danger.

"But that still leaves the matter of why it _hurts_ Crystal to not eat. You saw how ferocious she got the first day we stayed her and she got near blood. If Alec has been the source of subsistence her whole life, why does she feel like she's starving?" Peaches inquires.

"He doesn't provide the _substance._ No blood has ever made its way _into_ her body, only the nutrients that keep her as one of the undead, but she is as thin, brittle and _empty_ as the ghosts of Moundsville Penitentiary."

A feral growl tears through the room, and even Amber's eyes widen as everyone realizes it came from Alec. Jane looks on amusedly.

"Problem…Alec?" Aro tests.

"Do not speak of her that way. She is not _empty."_ Alec hisses in response. I blush. I blush so hard. It makes Alec clench his fists and crouch in an even more protective stance, yet he never makes a move to come closer to me.

"What do you propose we do?" Amber interrupts, bringing the real problem back into focus. She sounds tired, over the entire idea that I am human with a vicious vampire mate. She turns towards Aro, who had been glaring at Alec in a deferential fashion, captivated by his boldness.

Aro takes a long, long look at me, raping me with his eyes. Taking everything about me in, soaking up the unfeasible reality of who I was, and what I was made up of. Alec's food. Great.

"I'd like…to see…exactly what the outcomes of living off of another's vampire diet are." He finally decides. "Crystal is welcome, and I actually _strongly_ encourage it, to stay here for the duration of her transformation back into a human." An idea sparks in his eyes, and the fire frightens me.

"What exactly will you do to me once that transformation is complete?" I utter.

With that question, Alec finally makes a move and swishy-swooshes over to me, placing his hand on my arm protectively and staring intently at me. I look away, feeling the blush spread to my neck. I wonder how long before I'm unable to swishy-swoosh at fast speeds again.

"Seeing that Alec here won't… _allow_ anything to be done to you, we shall have to wait and see what those outcomes are and evaluate exactly how much of a threat they are." Aro muses thoughtfully, like he can't wait to dissect human lungs-turned-vampire-turned-human-again, as if they held some new secret power. Alec removed his hand, and instead placed his entire arm around my shoulders, pulling me close. When Aro dismisses us, Alec turns to me.

"I'm taking you away for a while."

I can still swishy-swoosh like I always have been able to, and it takes me and Alec the rest of daylight to travel to his childhood home in London. I don't say a word the whole way there. When we arrive, Alec takes a long look around where we've stopped. Streets are filled with cars that never stop and people that never look up from their phones. Tall and gothic-styled buildings tower over citizens and drip after a light rainfall. The skies are cloudy but it's a relaxing, soothing type of cloudy; the kind of cloudy that feels protective.

"It's so…modern." Alec finally says. "I haven't been away from the castle in…forever." There is sadness in his voice, a nostalgic longing that I wish I could restore.

"Is there where you grew up?"

Alec nods. "I suppose, but it's not the same." I can tell that if he was human, he'd want to cry. And how could he not? The only human years of his life have been completely abolished and replaced by things he can't even begin to comprehend being locked away in that castle for hundreds of years.

A couple passes us and stares at Alec. At first I think it's because he's beautiful, but a second glance tells me it's because of what he's wearing.

"When's the last time you changed your clothes?" I asked.

"The guard changes very frequently." He says.

"Right, but like, _updated?"_

"I'm not sure. Aro keeps various attires in stock from the late 17th century, but he tries to make sure we are kept up-to-date for the tourists Chelsea brings."

I nodded. He laced his fingers with mine. "Let's go." He muttered. He leads me at a normal pace through various backyards and behind alleys until we reach an older-looking home. There is a trampoline hidden amongst the dying weeds.

"What is that?" He asks, tilting his head to the side.

"It's a trampoline."

"What is its purpose?"

"You can bounce on it! The black thing is this stretchy material that you can jump on. It's a lot of fun."

"It seems like a good cause for physical injury."

I roll my eyes and release his hand, walking over the trampoline and climbing on, bouncing lightly. I even do a backflip. Alec watches with his arms crossed over his chest, but eventually cracks a smirk and joins me, though he doesn't move at all once he's on it.

Instead, on the trampoline, we lay side-by-side, close enough to be touching, but we're not.

"Tell me a secret." I whisper.

"What kind of secret?" Alec is staring at the sky, serene and peaceful.

"Any kind. The best kinds of secrets are ones where you don't have to think about telling them. You just say."

"My father died when I was young." He finally settles on confessing.

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay. I barely remember him anyways. He was a Frankish soldier, but was never really around much even when he was alive. It really was just me and my sister growing up."

"That must've been hard, but at least you had someone to confide in."

"I did. Jane was more commanding in what she wanted, but we both were feared throughout the village. I remember…" His face contorted into confusion, which quickly turned to frustration. "I don't remember a lot, actually." He settled. Turning to me, he hurriedly changed the topic. "Now you."

"Now me what?"

"Secret."

I bit my lip, trying to think about something good to satisfy him, but not something too personal.

"I've never masturbated before."

Alec's eyes widen, and automatically shifts a few inches away from me. I've piqued his interest, yet disturbed him in some way, and truthfully it's quite amusing.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean what I mean. What don't you get?"

" _That's_ your big secret?"

"Well, yes. Have you?"

"Of course I haven't! There's no need to, the idea of ever trying it in the first place is…appalling."

Now I'm the one that's confused and shocked. It is a natural fact of life that the typical teenage boy—vampire or not—has a conscience with the validity of a teaspoon of salt, for there is no rationality or serenity when it comes to desire and pleasure.

"Well…you should try it. I hear it's fun." I mutter oddly.

"Absolutely not!"

"It's an entirely natural thing; you have nothing to be ashamed of."

"Then why haven't _you_ tried it?"

I can feel the blush creep up my neck and settle warmly in my cheeks, and I turn my head away from him. I wonder how strong my blood smells to him.

"I've honestly never had anything to think about that would cause me to want to do it." I finally admit, digging the heels of my feet into the trampoline. Alec starts laughing; a throaty, sincere laugh that despite circumstances, may just be the most beautiful and vulnerable sound I've ever heard.

"What!" I demand.

"There's not a single person you can think of that you would want to pleasure yourself to?" He asks through his boyish giggling.

"No, Alec. There really isn't. I mean…Zac Efron isn't bad but what could I imagine that would satisfy me?

"This Zac guy being naked?"

"Do _you_ picture girls naked?"

"Nah…I picture Zac naked though."

We both start laughing, and it is an insanely… _human_ feeling. The pain in my side from laughing so hard, the tears pricking my eyes, the need to take gulps of air; all of the actions and the motions blossom into this wonderful sensation of being alive. And looking over at Alec, with his perfect cherry-colored eyes and white skin, I feel immense sympathy for him.

What if things were different and we were both human? What if we'd met in a nice café and slipped each other flirty looks and stolen smiles before one of us finally mucked up the courage to talk to the other? The icebreakers would range from chemistry exams and math homework to new movies and summer swims. Alec would be dressed in dark jeans and a jacket, messy hair in his face and warm, brown eyes. Soft skin. Tanned. Freckles. A heartbeat that was mine to claim and feel and hold my hand over after making love. Two humans, completely and arrantly in love with each other. Why can't our attraction be more than eternal?

"Alec," I say seriously, breathing deep and heavy, which he notices and rests his hand lightly on my tummy.

"Yeah?"

"Do you believe in soulmates?"

"Of course, every vampire has one."

"No, no." I shake my head, narrowing my eyes at the emerging stars. "We—you—don't have" I hesitate, "a soul."

I can see the slightest amount of hurt in his features, but he covers them up with an impassive eyebrow raise.

"Do you believe in soulmates? The idea that were is someone for everyone regardless of who they are or what their species is? Do you really think all people are capable of finding that kind of happiness in another person?"

Alec is silent, musing over things, and for once I wish I had that Cullen boy's power so I could see what Alec was thinking. It's funny how, out of the entirety of the Volturi, Alec appears to be the only one with actual thoughts and opinions, at least when you sit down and talk with him. There is nothing to be said of the kings, for they rule like any other dictator with a selfish goal of power; the guard is no better, though have shown some specks of personality; and the rest, such as Chelsea, live only to eat. I can't help wondering if vampires, in their rawest form, are nothing but terrified humans…scared to die, needing to eat for stay alive, forever searching for things they can't explain.

"I like to think of soulmates in a more scientific manner." Alec finally settles.

"Elaborate?"

"Have you heard the theory that when the universe was created, certain particles were more attracted to each other than others? So when the world was made and time goes on, those particles keep trying to find their way back to each other, and when they reunite, stars are formed. Once every person has found their soulmate then, constellations are created. Every star up there right now," he pointed to the dark sky, which had settled on the perfect hue of blue for illumination, "is a couple that have had their atoms reunited. And I think…I think that's the best way to explain soulmates. They're someone you will spend the rest of your life trying to find, and when you do find them…it's like everything is in harmony now, and an entire new world and perspective opens up. I don't think that would be possible without the efforts of everybody on Earth, human or vampire. Or wolf-thing."

We return to the castle in silence.

It takes us a long time because I've begun needing to take breaks to catch my breath.

Alex kisses my forehead once before leaving me to my room.

And in that moment, at 4:38 in the morning, when Italy was quiet with only the shimmering cacophony of late-night drivers and overexcited night owls to disrupt my thoughts, and the stars were bright and the vampires hunted, and a streak of tears made their way to my pillow, in _that_ moment

I realized I loved Alec Volturi.


	10. Chapter 9

Chapter Nine

 _"_ _I was born sick, but I love it"_

-"Take Me to Church," Hozier

i sat in the silence of the medieval castle. no one breathed. no one moved. i would've heard it. i sat there, trembling. i was so scared for crystal. i didn't trust alec; i didn't trust him to take care of her.

the last time peaches and i were here was because i had let the quileute tribe get too close to our kind. i had _joined_ them. twenty-five (or twenty-six?) years ago, five years after my transformation, i met members of the quileute tribe. maybe they were ancestors of jacob and them, maybe not. the ones _i_ met were jane wilde and her parents, hank wilde and doris ateara. upon first contact, it was as disastrous as anyone expected between a "cold one" and a werewolf. hank painted the picture of a lost family; feral children and members claimed the land i stumbled upon.

i approached the members like i would an actual wild animal; one hand out, slow pace, speaking softly.

 _"_ _it's okay, no, no, it's okay. i don't mean to hurt you."_

 _"_ _you are one of them. leave us." hank snarled._

i lolled my head back against the castle wall in nostalgic aching. i even remember his voice, so demanding and strong.

 _"_ _i am not here to harm anyone. i'm not even hungry. i just…i'm a bit…what are you?"_ my hair was longer then, falling in crisp ringlets that would make rosalie hale's blonde locks green with envy. i had large, innocent eyes, blood-red and freshly curious. i was beautiful. i was young.

hank stood tall, muscular and very, very finely chiseled. _"we are the quileute tribe, werewolves, and we despise every blood-sucking monster out there. leave now!"_ at this, the rest of his pack emerged, in their wolf form, and i backed up, stumbling. i was amazed; they were beautiful. one wolf sauntered up to me on the ground, growling and drooling. i raised my hand cautiously, and rested it on his nose, petting softly. he growled louder and snapped. pulling my bleeding fingers back, i sat cross-legged and continued to stare in awe.

had peaches not come right that moment, i think they would've eaten me. i received a lecture, as was expected from my creator, about the world of werewolves, but all i was focused on was the sting of my fingers that still bled, and how soft their fur was, and how the night sky was trapped in their eyes. they were truly enchanting creatures.

for weeks following my first encounter with them, i followed them. i ran by them in the forest, always outrunning them, but keeping up enough that i could see all the incredible things they could do. it had become my guilty pleasure, the only thing i was immensely fascinated by, and with my constant presence, it wasn't long before i eventually fell in love with one of the quileute members.

 _this_ is what brought us to the volturi for the first time.

how he loved me back, i'll never know, but i'll never forget the first time i met caius. my enchanter, _my werewolf,_ caressed me with the gentleness of a falling snowflake. he kissed me with the passion of someone continuously drowning and gasping for air, that adrenaline and fear all mixed into the motion of our lips. my pale skin, devoid of any blood flow, was alight when his hot, sweating body held mine. everything about their tribe, their life, their senses and abilities belonged to me.

until they came.

aro, marcus, caius and jane came for me the night i lost myself to my werewolf. peaches and i traveled to italy in silence; she shook with defiance and annoyance, and i stilled with fear and ignorance.

caius went over the entirety of the volturi's intolerance for werewolf relations and alliances and blah, blah, blah. even though it was my first time with the supposedly terrifying vampire rulers, i had grown bored within the first ten minute of arriving until they mentioned my punishment.

there are no leniencies with the volturi, and for the sake of power, they must go to extremities regardless of the severity of the crime unless they want you to join. my power was of no use to them. i was supposed to die that day.

peaches and i both fought. at one point i had felix under me, and peaches had demetri's throat in her grasp, but it was only for entertainment, and when the _kings_ got bored, jane took care of us. i was on my knees. my head was secured between felix's large hands. my arms were behind my back. _i was ready to die._

but caius stopped them.

pretty blonde-haired caius descended the steps with grace and drama, yanking me to my feet and out of felix's hold, who looked at his master with a look of confusion.

 _"_ _i think there is more to the story than you are telling." caius whispered._

he knew there wasn't. i knew there wasn't. aro knew there wasn't. it was plain and simple: i had associated myself with the quileute tribe and was in a relationship with a werewolf. i lived with the pack and hunted with them. that's all there was and they all knew that.

caius had deeper intentions with me than just a quick death. i was too….what had he called me? _acidic?_ oh well, it must've not been very significant if i can't remember it.

my affair with caius was not one of love or romance like it was with my werewolf. it was raw and untamed, a survival contest. every question caius wanted an answer to was punctuated with soft touches and hard, unnecessary breathing. i did not love caius. he was fascinated by me as i had been with the tribe when i first met them. because he was one of the vampire kings, he was allowed to do this to me, and i could not entirely lay the blame on him, because i allowed it, too.

 _my mate—my true mate—i found out was killed by aro when caius was buried inside me. while i was in the arms of another man, muddle-brained and scared, my werewolf, my enchanter, was being torn to shreds._

i slammed my head against the wall of the castle.

 _while peaches was being held in a secluded room because of my mistake as a newborn, i was being taken by one of the vampire kings._

i slammed my head harder and harder.

 _when i was naked under the moonlight that used to shower my mate and i in a beautiful afterglow of what true love was, the volturi took the rest of the quileute tribe apart. jane. hank. doris. the first werewolves to accept me when they had no reason to trust me._

harder and harder and harder until a crack shattered the wall of the room i leaned against.

 _i had been the distraction. the volturi had no care if i was killed or not. they probably didn't even fucking care if i was with a werewolf. they wanted them gone. and i was the distraction with the one who hated them the most._

harderharderharder i deserved to be punished like this.

 _i let him die. i left peaches with the guilt of believing she was responsible. i gave something away on the account that i thought it would save me._

there was nothing i could harm myself with that would make me feel better. twelve years later, after numerous suicide attempts, we found crystal, and i wanted nothing more to protect her, but i seemed to fuck that up too.

breaking away from my memories, i listened to new voices i heard in the castle. not bothering to look at the damage i'd done to the wall, i slowly made my way outside the throne room where the voices were coming from. it was alec and aro. where was crystal? had alec brought her back already?

"it doesn't matter what she is, you can't harm her!" it was alec. "you can't hurt her like that again!" his voice was defiant, like a man's, not the sixteen-year-old body he was trapped in.

"alec," aro's soft but firm voice drifted out next. "it is inevitable that she will be human again soon. perhaps even in a few days! just because she _was_ a vampire, that does not mean we can allow a _human_ to roam the world."

"she wouldn't be roaming. she can stay with me—with _us—_ here. i'll take care of her. i'll get her all the human food she needs and all the human necessities—"

"i'm sure you would take excellent care of her, alec."

i push myself deeper into the wall, straining to hear every single word. alec sounded like he was trying to prove he'd be a good dog owner. i tried not to snort.

"but the fact of the matter is," aro continued, "that when she becomes a human…we're going to have to change her back." he finished simply.

if i had a heart, it would've dropped, and it took everything in me not to jump in there and murder both of them.

"you can't!" alec exclaimed.

"oh, i won't. you will." i could hear the joyful smile in aro's voice.

"i can't, she won't survive. the human body barely makes it through the first transformation. the venom is too strong, her body has just started to revert back to living with human cells. she can't possibly have her insides coated with venom _again_!"

"alec, alec, alec." aro mused, probably shaking his head like this was a joke. "you're not understanding."

"you can't put her through that pain again." alec insisted. i wished i could see his face to see exactly how sincere he was.

"what will you do when you smell her circulating blood again, alec?" aro asked.

"i—i can control myself. i know i can." alec stammered.

"mmm. as a human, crystal will begin to age again, or, for all we know, her years lost as a vampire will catch back up with her, and she will gain thirteen years of age. could you handle being with a twenty-eight-year-old, and eventual death for her?"

alec was stuttering, saying nothing coherent, and aro knew he had him.

"she's going to want to live a human life: see the world, meet new people, experience life before her expiration. with the risk of that much exposure to the human world and her knowledge of ours, we'd have no choice but to confine her to the castle. is that really something you want for her? then there is the matter of her coven. surely they will not want to leave her, but we can't handle two more vampires in our castle—such a waste of space—how do you suppose we handle her _family_ situation? then there is the physiological aspect; suppose as you continue to feed, crystal continues to receives the nutrients from the blood when as a human, she can no longer handle it."

aro was bombarding alec, forcing all these scenarios into his head that none of us had honestly considered. aro was backing alec into a corner, leaving him absolute no choice but to change her back. but there's no way she could survive again.

breathing in once, i pushed the doors open and strutted in.

it hadn't been just alec and aro. caius, marcus and jane were there, too. all heads turned to me.

aro smiled. "amber!"

i panicked. "you can't. you just can't. you cannot make crystal a vampire again. she is going to complete her human transformation, and you are going to let us leave then." i hurried out, making sure he knew my point.

aro _tsked_ and shook his head; alec look frightened and didn't move. "dear, dear amber. don't you know how rude it is to eavesdrop on another's private conversation?"

"i don't care. what you want to do to crystal is wrong. you can't possibly think after all this…to just change her back! she's going to have the exact same problem; she won't eat."

"it won't matter, alec gets her the food she needs." aro's eyes drifted upwards, as if he was in a trance.

"that's not a healthy lifestyle! it's the _exact same problem!"_ i was so furious at them, at the volturi. they did nothing, they hurt others for no reason, the killed for no reason. in my rage and frustration, i punched one of their marble walls. a wide crack emerged and part of the ceiling fell from above, nearly crushing jane.

jane immobilized me, a new fire burning in her dark eyes. she was hungry. around me, the world spun, and i felt someone grab at my legs. i kicked sporadically, gripping the floor in pain and tearing at—who was it? demetri?—demetri's body. i hadn't seen him come into the room. he threw me across the room, breaking jane's concentration, and i hurried up, brushing a strand of hair from my face.

jane was my target—everyone in the room was—but she pissed me off the most. but before i had even walked a few feet towards her, demetri grabbed my shoulders and forced me to the floor, slamming my head against it until all i heard was a shattering in my ears and i knew my skin had split. my eyesight became fractured, like looking through a kaleidoscope.

"aro…" alec started cautiously.

"stay out of this." aro snapped bitterly, the happy smile gone. he stalked towards me, a dangerous look in his eyes; a demented and gone look. within seconds, marcus and demetri had me on my knees, and aro, ever so subtly, nodded to the one person that destroyed me the most.

caius came towards me with no emotion, nothing to give any indication of what he was feeling, and the sense of déjà vu had never been stronger. i even smirked a little at the circumstances.

"aro…aro, don't." i heard alec warn, but he was nothing to them in this moment. in this moment, i belonged to the volturi kings. my smirk widened.

caius stopped in front of me, smirking as well, and for a second, it was like we were both reliving the sadistic past we shared, and laughing about it like old college friends. carefully, gently, like we were lovers again, caius rested his hands on either side of my face. flashes of…everything ran through my mind. my werewolf, my betrayal, my transformation, my crystal.

caius leaned in real close, close enough to kiss. "i've missed seeing you in this position." he whispered. "submissive, below me, _rough."_

"tell me," i whispered right back, "when are you planning on telling athenodora about us?" i even nipped at his nose for a good show. i could feel everyone's eyes on us.

caius' face turned hard, stone hard, and he gripped me tighter, his nails digging into the side of my neck. "i hope you go to the same place that your fucking werewolf scum is in." he scowled, and my last thoughts jumped between my werewolf and my crystal. at the last second, i turned to alec, praying he saw the desperation in my eyes, praying that he saw that i needed him to save crystal. i think he did. i hope he did. and with that silent promise out of the way, i did selfishly think of my werewolf, my mate, and how, wherever he _did_ end up, i would see him there, too.

 _i was ready this time._


	11. Chapter 10

Chapter Ten

 _"_ _All of your flaws and all of my flaws are laid out one by one,_

 _Look at the wonderful mess that we made"_

-"Flaws," Bastille

Something happened. Something wasn't right. I turned away from the book I'd been reading, breaking into a run for the stairs leading to Alec's room. It took longer to get there than I'd ever experienced before, and I stumbled, hit my foot on something, and smacked into several objects along the way. When I finally did reach his door, he was already waiting with wide eyes.

"Alec!" I huffed. "What—something—something's wrong, I can feel it."

He nodded once, swallowing. He looked guilty, like he had something to hide.

"What? What is it, Alec? What?" I pressed.

He opened and closed his mouth several times before speaking, making sure to close the door before. Like that would help anything.

"Crystal," he started, "Amber is…"

"What? What happened to Amber? Tell me, Alec!" I grabbed the front of his coat, wishing I was still strong enough to throw people across rooms.

"Amber is dead, Crystal." He choked out, forcefully and quick, like pulling off a Band-Aid.

I couldn't breathe. I mean…I _literally_ could not breathe. My throat closed up, and I had to awkwardly huff several times before I could properly enunciate anything that didn't sound like blubbering. I _needed_ air now. Reaching for my neck, tears sprung to my eyes at the new, foreign feeling; the sudden need to _breathe_ and _cry_ at the same time like a normal person constricted my movement and made my head swim. Alec placed his hand on my shoulder, but I threw him off and hit him in the chest, though it didn't do much, and he recoiled.

"Who?" I choked, feeling like I would vomit.

Alec hung his head in shame, and I knew right then. "Wh-Why didn't you stop them!" I screamed with asperity. "What did you do? What did you fucking do, Alec!" Turning sharply, still muttering obscenities, I set off to find Peaches. I heard Alec right behind me.

"I want to say I hate you and that I want you dead but I can't because it's not true but I am right there in that neighborhood of hating you!" I huffed out all in one breath.

"Crystal, I couldn't do any—"

"You could've done plenty of things! You could've stepped in front of her! They wouldn't kill one of their most valued guards! Or talked to Aro! Or-or-or killed them yourself—"

"Crystal, do you hear yourself?"

"No! I can't hear anything over the sound of a lying, angry, cowardly, pathetic bastard trailing behind me!" I hear Alec stop, and I spin around to face him. The hurt is evident on his face, and he looks abused. Good.

"If you loved me like you fucking claim to, if we're really mates—and for a while there I believed it—you should've known. You should've. It. You." I try to pull at my hair to regain my sanity but end up smacking my forehead instead, and I let myself stay in that face-palmed position for a second. "She means so much to me…" I inhale, taking shaky breaths. I can tell my face is cherry-red.

Footsteps echo from the direction I was heading. Alec violently grabs me bridal-style, and he zips us back to his room, where he starts opening the window.

"What are you doing? I have to find Peaches!" I whisper.

He turns to me, wide-eyed and terrified, something I've never seen in his face before.

"They're not happy, Crystal. They're coming. They'll want you next."

"Aro was supposed to fix me! Carlisle promised! Can't he fix this?" All rationality drains from my body, and for the first time in a long, long time, I feel completely human. _Helpless._ Alec hears it, too, and if he can hear it, I know the rest of the Volturi can. Dark entities cloud my mind, and I clutch myself, nails digging into my arms where blood is rushing and pulsing and goosebumps are forming and for the first time I am truly _petrified._

"Your heart…"

"Alec?" I ask, genuinely frightened.

"Run."

The door opens, and Demetri saunters in. Alec has the window open, and before Demetri can grab me, we are out the window and falling safely to the ground below.

"There are tunnels that contain the living spaces, three stories below the town. Past them, there's an entrance into the castle—the Volterra sewers that connect to the castle's passageways. One of the passages leads to a drainage hole right on the edge of the city. With Demetri, they'll still track us, but that drainage hole is how we'll alert the Cullens that you're in danger."

He was speaking all too fast, and my mind couldn't keep up. I just let myself be carried by the boy that was now a hundred times stronger than I could ever be, my new heartbeat working overtime, pumping, pumping, pumping.

We raced through the tunnels. 

The sun is bright when we emerge. Alec, in addition to being obviously panicky and estranged at the moment, has an arduous look on his face.

"What's wrong?" I ask. He shakes his head, his hair falling over his eyebrows.

"Let's go."

"You're really taking me back to the Cullens? What about Peaches?"

"That's what…that's what I don't get." Alec looks over his shoulder. "They _let_ us go. Does that mean they're doing something to Peaches?"

My heart must've sped up dramatically because Alec looks extremely uncomfortable and keeps glancing at my neck. I wonder what I smell like to him now.

"No. No, no, no. I've lost Amber, I'm not losing Peaches, too." Alec restrains me as I try to run away, and I kick and struggle but I know it is now useless. I am useless. I am human. I'm still furious at Alec, and his prevention of my saving Peaches only ticks me off more.

"Crystal, you can't! The Volturi want to _change you back,_ and it's absolutely doubtless that your body won't survive a second transformation. You. Can't. Go. Back. There."

"But—"

"I promised Amber, right before they killed her. I saw, I _knew._ She asked me, Crystal, and I'm not going to let anything happen to you."

Defeated, we waste no more time and Alec takes me to Forks.

* * *

There are certain scents and colors and sounds that never fail to associate themselves with a specific place. From the California beaches to London rain, some sights never truly leave you, no matter how long you're gone or how far you've been. The Cullens' home is one of those places, and I sigh nostalgically.

Tired, I make no objections as Alice leads me to a bed that is only for appearances, and I flop down on it. Like a human. The thought turns over and over in my head until Alec nudges the door open and stands awkwardly there. He has changed his clothes, so he looks a little more like a normal teenage boy in black slacks and a dark long-sleeved shirt, but the ominous and powerful feeling emitting from him is the same.

He sits at the end of the bed, and his brown hair falls in his face. His overall appearance is disheveled, unkempt, like he was up late preparing for school exams. He looks older, somehow.

"I don't think Carlisle is going to talk to them."

I turn my head from the pillow I'd been laying on. "Why not? He's the diplomatic one."

Alec shakes his head, staring at the wall adorned with photos of the Cullens that'll never age, books that are over-read, and music that'll never be popular again. "This is serious, Crystal. His most previous encounter with the Volturi, concerning the child of Edward and Bella, was an issue that had been outlawed. Immortal children. It happened, it was the past. This is different. This is dealing with genetically modified vampirism; the venom that coated your cells just…disappeared. And the only evidence we have is my love was strong enough to do that. Not very convincing."

"You sound more and more like Carlisle with each passing second."

Alec smirks at that, and gauchely lays down beside me, rigid and still in comparison to my angled body. Absentmindedly, he starts playing with my hair, and I accidentally tense up. He stops.

We lay like that for a while, with me turned away from him and his hand resting lightly on my shoulder, every so often rubbing small circles. I think we're both thinking of our next move. We can't run away, but I had to see Peaches again. We had to get her back, and I tried thinking of heroic escape plans, but every idea was squashed when I remembered the abilities that vampires had.

We thought in silence for about an hour, and I was beginning to drift to sleep when Alec shoots up, nearly knocking me off the bed. He's at the door instantly, and it freaks me out a little to see it. Is that how I looked when I could run like him?

Alec leaves while I get out of bed slowly, and then I hear glass shatter, and I rush downstairs. At first, I think it's Peaches, and my heart leaps with excitement. But the blonde hair and petite frame make my heart drop, and then I notice the Cullens are all standing at least five feet away from her.

It's Jane.

And Alec is hugging her like his life depends on it; I expect to hear her bones snap any moment.

I seem to be trying to make as much noise as possible as I come down the stairs, and Jane pulls back from Alec to look at me. There is something in her face I've never seen before: worry. Panic. She looks as untidy as Alec with a few loose strands of blonde hair covering her face and her clothes a little more out of place than usual. Small trickles of blood drip from gashes in her left arm that heal by the time I've made it to the ground floor.

"Where is my sister?" I splutter.

"Dead." The hostility in her voice is still there.

"The _other_ one!" I almost mutter "bitch" under my breath, but decide against it. Who knows how powerful her gift is against humans compared to vampires.

Jane's eyes fall to the floor, and the defiant act is replaced by a slumped stature. "Peaches attacked Felix the last time I saw her. Ripped his head clean off. The kings were furious, and Caius tore her arm off. Aro wanted me to subdue her, but I…I couldn't." She says this ashamedly, like it was wrong of her to not hurt anyone.

"You and Alec had left by then, under the tunnels," Jane continued. "Aro was coming towards me, and I—I didn't know what to do. I had to find my brother. He sent Demetri after you two, but when I fled, I think he decided to wait. He's…planning something." Jane finished.

"This is very critical information. Thank you, Jane." Carlisle coaxes after several minutes of silence from the rest of their coven. No one looked happy to have the twins in their home.

"So what now?" Jasper asked. "Whatever Aro's planning, we have to hide Crystal. We have to protect her. Alice can warn us when he's ready, but until then, we're traveling on thin ice."

At that moment, my tummy growled loudly, and I flushed with embarrassment. I hadn't eaten in, well, _years,_ but now it was different. I needed human food. At this thought, I realized just how calm all the Cullens were behaving, even Jasper, at a newly created human occupied their home. I was so grateful.

"Let's get her fed, then I think our next move should be retrieving Peaches." Carlisle said.

"Wait, you mean she's actually gonna eat?" Alec asked, alarmed.

Carlisle nodded. "We can figure out her new anatomy later, but if you keep feeding and her body still receives the nutrients from blood, she could die. Take her…" Carlisle hesitated, a funny look crossing his face, "to a McDonald's maybe?"

The Cullens all smirked and held in fits of laughter. Human food—the idea seemed so silly, especially since I knew they weren't that involved in Bella's eating habits before she was turned. They were only concerned with not eating _her._

"This'll be interesting." Emmett grinned. Alec looked horrified. He was the one that had to take me.

* * *

The drive there is tense, uncertain. I needed to know if my sister was okay. My stomach growled and my head hurt and I forgot how to breathe several times during the drive. Alec looked stiff and stayed away from me the whole time. Too many things. Too much happening. Food. Coffee.

 _My human life._

Alec received several stares at McDonald's, and he constantly shifted and looked everywhere but the eyes of those gawking. It was kinda cute how uncomfortable he was. I got two cheeseburgers, fries, and a coke. We sat outside as I dug into my fries, and two kids on bikes stopped and stared at Alec.

"Where'd you get your clothes, mister?" One of them asked.

"Master Aro." Alec replied quietly, shrinking into himself.

"Master?" The other one inquired. "What are you, a prince?"

"Or a slave?" The first one asked, and the pair erupted into giggles with dirty thoughts running through their minds.

"Beat it, assholes." I hissed.

It looked like the first one was going to retaliate, but Alec straightened up then, pulling his shoulders back and growling lowly, and the two kids hurried off.

I smiled, ketchup caught on the side of my mouth, leaning into Alec. "My hero." I said behind a mouthful of fries.

Alec looked down at me, utter shock written on his face at the sentiment, before smiling widely and wrapping one arm around my shoulders, turning his head the other way. I suspect the sight of the red ketchup and my close proximity was giving him a hard time controlling his thirst. I leaned away apologetically.

"It was nothing." He mumbled, and if he was a human, I bet he would've blushed. He liked the attention; I could tell.

Too soon, however, his pride turned to despondence. "I wish I could've done more for Amber."

I finished my meal and sucked on the straw of my drink before answering as delicately as I could. "I wish she was still here; I wish Aro and those he has manipulated didn't have to do what they did." I rubbed my hands over my thighs uneasily.

Alec nodded, understanding my underlying point: I wish he had done more, too.

My tummy feels full, _I_ feel full. I haven't felt that in a very long time, and I honestly feel like I might vomit at the feeling. We drive back to the Cullens, and walk hand-in-hand to the living room, where Alice is waiting with news of the Volturi.

* * *

 **A/N: In case you haven't noticed, I'm having major writer's block and updates are taking a lot longer than they should be. I'd honestly love to hear any ideas/suggestions anyone has for this story, either in reviews or PM me, but I also understand that I need to figure this out myself. Sorry for any future delays.**


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